ABSTRACT
Bullying has been a part of school culture for a long time and, apart from one or two far-sighted academics (Lowenstein 1978; Olweus 1978), there was virtually no research carried out into the topic before 1980. Almost all researchers were deterred by the difficulties of definition and the way in which bullying seemed to be a part of social life in schools. In addition, the impossibility of experimental manipulation, or even simulation, of the bullying process by researchers made the difficulties of conducting research greater. The organisational sensitivities of schools and colleges meant school staffs did not want to admit to the issue for fear of their public image. There has been an explosion of research during the last ten years, but some schools are still justifiably anxious about tackling bullying in too open a fashion. They fear that such anti-bullying action by staff may be interpreted as indicating that there was a severe problem in the first place. Anxiety over disclosure influences the victims as well as the schools, and many young people and their parents keep their problems to themselves. However, in 1991 the Department of Education in the UK gave a research grant to Professor Peter Smith in Sheffield, to fund an intervention study in the city (Smith and Sharp 1994; Sharp and Smith 1994). This built on the collections of writing put together previously by various authors and editors to record what schools were doing to combat bullying (Besag 1989; Roland and Munthe 1989; Tattum and Lane 1989). In 1994, the Department for Education in the UK published ‘Don’t suffer in silence’, a set of in-service training materials for schools, arising from the Sheffield research. Since then, most schools in the country have felt much more supported by educational administrators and advisers in the Local Education Authorities, consultants of various sorts and researchers, so that they can begin to tackle bullying with
some hope of success. Researchers have built up a general picture of many of the issues of concern around bullying, and these will be detailed and expanded on in the following sections.
