Recess was Allie Long’s favorite part of the day until the second grade, when some of her friends on the playground pressured her to join their whisper campaign against a classmate.
Allie shrugged. She didn’t want to hear their rumor or help spread it around. In an instant, her best friends since kindergarten became her tormenters.
“They started taunting and teasing her,” said Allie’s mom, Trudy Ludwig. “She was on this play structure and they blocked all of the exits and wouldn’t let her off. They started moving closer to her.
“Allie just freaked out. One of the girls realized it was getting out of hand and got a teacher to help.”
Bullying among adolescents has captured the attention of researchers, educators and parents alarmed by a parade of mean girls and cyber-bullies caught in mid-punch on viral video. But such aggression may not just happen in a whirl of adolescent hormones, some in the growing anti-bully movement argue.
Some older bullies were “Barbie Brats” first.
In Allie’s case, the kids were talked to, but things weren’t the same at her Beaverton, Ore., school.
“My daughter cried herself to sleep on and off for several months,” Ludwig said. “She had stomachaches. The phone stopped ringing. No playdates. No invitations to sleepovers.”
They were just 7 years old.
Meline Kevorkian, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., researcher and public speaker on bullying, surveyed 167 educators last year and 25 percent indicated bullying occurs most in elementary schools.
Research also indicates that three-quarters of 8- to 11-year-olds report they’ve been bullied, with more than half identifying it as a “big” problem, Kevorkian said.
“It could be you wear the wrong shoes or the wrong socks. If you didn’t go to the Hannah Montana concert. Your lunch smells. You can’t wear certain bows in your hair,” she said. “It’s not that the victims are all going to grow up and shoot kids in their high school, but it’s the message that making fun of people will make you popular.”
Rumor-spreading, teasing, exclusive clubs, secrets. What social scientists describe as “relational aggression” is often unjustly written off among younger kids as routine rites of passage not worthy of extra hands-on attention, Kevorkian and other anti-bully experts said.
Ludwig, who was inspired by her now 14-year-old daughter’s experience to write four picture books on bullying, said girls in particular often connect by sharing secrets that can later be turned into weapons. Such verbal abuse and social manipulation, which Ludwig and other experts say is on the rise in boys, often flies under the radar of harried parents, teachers or baby sitters.
“Little kids are born to be kindhearted,” said Michele Borba, who writes and speaks frequently on bullying, “They’ve got that natural empathy, but unless you nurture it, it lies dormant.”
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