Prenatal and family precursors of bullying involvement in childhood and their consequences into early adulthood

Research on bullying started in earnest in 1982 when three young boys killed themselves in short succession in Norway, all leaving notes that they had been bullied by their peers. Many more suicides in children attributed to bullying have occurred since then. Killing oneself is the most extreme form of escaping the bullies. If not self-harm, being a victim of bullying can lead to a range of mental health and physical health problems in childhood. The increasing evidence of harm by bullying led to a conference on the prevention of bullying organised by President Obama and the First Lady in March 2011. In the President's words "If there's one goal of this conference, it's to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up. It's not." (1)

However, whether children can put their experiences aside once they graduate from school, or whether involvement in bullying throws a long shadow over the lives of affected children is unknown. The first objective of this study is to find out about the long term effects of being bullied on health, work life and success, crime involvement and social adaptation in young adulthood. This will be accomplished by studying the effect of bullying in childhood on young adult outcome in two long term studies, the Avon Longitudinal Study in the UK (ALSPAC) and the Great Smoky Mountain Study in the USA (GSMS) that investigated children up to 18 and 26 years, respectively.

Most approaches to beat bullying to date have focussed on schools. School interventions have been shown to have some but limited effects on reducing rates of bullying. To develop new innovative prevention or intervention strategies beyond the school setting, it is important to understand what makes children likely targets of bullies even before they enter school. Families are the primary place where children learn rules of how to behave, negotiate with their parents and siblings, or where they observe how parents and siblings treat each other and deal with conflicts. Thus when parents are harsh or hostile in their parenting or often fight with each other, does it affect how children deal with bullying by peers? Furthermore, even before the child is born, stress in pregnancy can affect the development of organs such as the brain and how children later deal with stress. Unknown is whether stress in pregnancy may make some children more likely to become targets of bullying because they show easily a reaction such as getting upset or start crying. Bullies home in on children who show strong emotional reactions. Finally, being a member of an ethnic minority group may result in more bullying. The second objective is to find out whether stress in pregnancy (family adversity, maternal anxiety and depression), family relations in the preschool years (i.e. problematic partner relationships, parenting) and individual characteristics (how emotional the child is, ethnicity) predicts who becomes a victim or bully at school age.

The findings will help to develop new strategies to strengthen families and children and prevent children from becoming the target of bullying or use bullying to torment other children.

Sources:

1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/10/president-obama-first-lady-white-house-conference-bullying-prevention

Understanding the precursors of peer victimisation and their effects on social relationships, work life and income generation, involvement in crime and health in early adulthood is important to improve the nations wealth, health and culture.

The beneficiaries from this research are:

1. Academia (e.g. psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists, economists, criminologists, public health professionals, genetic epidemiologists) nationally and internationally. The impact will be on theory development and development of an interdisciplinary research programme (understanding mechanisms, prevention research)
2. Public Sector. This includes the sectors involved in health delivery in pregnancy and postnatal (i.e. NHS, GPs), preschool services (e.g. sure start, nursery education, parent education), schools (teachers) and services for promoting skills for young people in their transition to employment (e.g. Departments of Work and Pensions; Education)
3. Third Sector. The findings will have high relevance for the Anti-Bullying Alliance (e.g. NSPCC, Childline, Beatbullying, Kidscape, National Bullying Helpline, Childrens Society etc.).
4. General Public. Bullying is high on the list of parent and school children's concern. It would highlight potential pathways to help.
5. Business/Industry. There are no direct commercial implications. However, should victimised children show poorer adaptation to employment, dealing with these past experiences could increase productivity and development of employee potential. Resulting intervention tools that could be IT based (serious games) would require industrial developers.

How might they benefit from this research?

1. The research makes a contribution to understanding health and wellbeing of children and adults. It has direct implications for educating health professionals. Awareness about the long term sequelae of bullying helps to integrate this into practice: e.g. the GP asking about bullying in children and young people as precursor of presenting symptoms. The development of potential interventions that are NHS linked (e.g. NIHR).
2. If employment, income generation or dependence on social benefits is related to peer victimisation in childhood, then strengthening individuals to resist victimisation and promote positive peer relationships (prevention, intervention) may be a highly cost effective investment for social welfare and public services.
3. Third sector. The results on adult outcome would strengthen their fund raising abilities. Findings will inform their information campaigns, training and development of prevention and intervention strategies. The findings may have implications for third sector funders of research into pregnancy (e.g. Tommy's), health (Wellcome Trust), child development and education (e.g. Nuffield Foundation, Jacobs Foundation).

Pathways to Impact

1. The findings are new and would allow for high impact publications in academic journals.
2. The findings will be disseminated at an international and national conference for professionals. It is likely to generate further interest for presentation at special interest group conferences.
3. The applications includes a special dissemination workshop that will present the main findings targeted at multiple stakeholders: Third sector delegates (charities involved with children and bullying), Public sector (invitees from Education and Work and Pension Department), Teacher delegates (via teacher unions, organisations), health service delgates, public figures involved in bullying prevention (e.g. Esther Rantzen, Fiona Bruce); academics.
4. Communication activities with the media will be facilitated and coordinated by the Press Office at the University of Warwick. Press releases are likely to be generated by release of the findings in academic journals, conferences and the final dissemination event. Furthermore, a podcast and summary fact sheet will be produced by the research team.