 And now it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Dr. Dorothy Espelage. Dr. Espelage is from the University of Illinois Champaign and has conducted research on bullying, homophobic teasing, sexual harassment, and dating violence for two decades. She has over 120 research publications. She's a public investigator on the CDC-funded second-step randomized clinical trial to prevent violence in 50 middle schools. National Science Foundation funds her work to develop better observational methods to assess bullying among adolescents. NIJ and NIH are funding her longitudinal and social network studies of these behaviors. She conducts hundreds of keynotes and workshops to disseminate her research findings each year. So it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Dr. Dorothy Espelage. Oh, Georgia, I need the clicker. Sorry. Good morning. How is everyone? Good. Me too. I don't think I've seen my legs in six months. I'm not sure if I knew how to. I'm from Chicago, so. I definitely didn't know how to walk in high heels, either. I've been in hugs for six months. So we're going to have a very exciting 90 minutes, I hope. Several caveats. You've heard that I've studied this phenomenon with my team for the last two decades. So you're going to hear 90 minutes of two decades worth of work and a lot of stories and a lot of pushback. And we just keep pushing forward. So you should know that you're getting the tip of the iceberg. And what I'm going to ask you to do is I'm not one of those scholars that kind of sits in my office and pontificates and thinks that everything I say is correct. In fact, I'm in the schools almost every other day when I'm in the state that I reside in. And I'm out spreading the word. Just this week, I was in LA on Monday for the Stonewall Museum Symposium to talk about some serious issues around gender nonconforming youth in our schools. I was in D.C. yesterday, and I'm in Santa Cruz today for the first time. So you should know that I don't need you to agree with me. Be critical. Tell me how this stuff doesn't apply to your context. That's great. Let's really kind of sit here for 90 minutes, think about some of the things that we've been trying to do, trying to make things better. You should know that in the last 24 hours, there's an app called YikGek, Y-A-K, Y-A-K, that is an app that was being used by youth in one of our fluent high schools, Nutrier. It's where you want to send your kids so that they can go to Harvard and you. And they were using that app to essentially engage in really insultive behaviors that app has been brought down, shut down in the state of Illinois. I'm sure it's in other states. So as much as we think that things are getting better, there's still tons of work to do, and I'm not one of those that's going to come up here and I have the answer to everything. I'm in the schools now, and I'm getting major pushback when I want to talk to teachers and others about protecting sexual minority youth. We still have a lot of work to do. And as much as we put bracelets on and put posters on and create t-shirts, there's still a lot of work to do in our society to address a lot of the violence we're going to talk about. When I'm on the road, as we speak today, we're conducting some focus groups with sexual minority youth in Illinois. So when I talk, what you don't see is, these are all the studies that we've done, and certainly we disseminate this research broadly. And this is one example of how I do this. But what you don't see is about 30 PhDs behind me and about 10,000 undergrads and some really brave principals and superintendents that have allowed us into their schools to do this work, which is always not politically correct. And there's definitely been some pushbacks. You should know that. We've done a series of studies. Again, I'm not just kind of sitting in an office writing about this, but all of our work is iterative. As the lives of kids have changed over the last two decades, so has our research questions, so has our prevention approaches. So I'm going to give you kind of just a sampling of what we're about and where we need to go. This is a slide that I created in the last year because of the wonderful ways in which the media has created a panic in us, right? Now, you say two decades, wow, Dorothy, in 1993 you were talking about this? Yes, I was, and I was encouraging the federal government to do something about it. Then in fact, the rates that we have now in bowling are a little bit lower than they were in 1993. It doesn't feel like it because the press covers bullying and social media and pathologizes this kind of phenomenon to the point of where if you work with parents, you know that the minute they hear that their child is being bullied, they actually think suicide, so much so that there is a word called bully side. Now, I'm not diminishing the experiences of losing a child to suicide in any capacity. That is not what I'm about. But the reality is that bullying is not an epidemic. You know, we have now, say, paying attention to it. Is it a public health concern? That's even debatable as well. Bullying has been around for a very, very long time and it continues to be part of our fabric, our culture, our social-political framework. So if we want to think that it's an epidemic and something that we need to address, that's okay, but we need to slow down and recognize that we cannot fix it overnight. Otherwise, we would have done that in the last three years given that Obama had his first White House conference three years ago. And, you know, we've got Lady Gaga on it. So certainly, we should, and Ellen Gigenaris and One Direction and Target and the Karashians, right? So we've got everybody on board, but the reality is that we have to understand the phenomenon and understand where bullying is not a problem. And that's where I hope that we hear from the high school students today. When you talk to middle school and high school students in this country, some of them say we don't have that problem in our school. We never talk about that in the media, right? So why don't we understand where things are going well as opposed to this panic around epidemic? The bully suicide link is unfortunate because the bully suicide, there is no causal link between bullying and suicide. What's missing from that is the mediator called mental health and mental health issues and the lack of mental health resources in this country. I currently have a niece who is gender non-conforming. And she's gender non-conforming to the point where her peers have pushed her out of public schools into alternative schools and she's now engaging in what we would call cutting, right? So here's my research really hitting home. And to get mental health access for her so that we can prevent that potential suicide risk has been quite a challenge, right? And so that's kind of real world. But recognizing that if we treat the depression, anxiety, isolation and other things that are associated with being chronically victimized and then we will slow down the suicide rate. In addition to this, we also have this notion that these bullies are these budding criminals. We want to pathologize the bully as well. Not that you guys read this in depth to developmental psychology literature, but if you do, you would find that there's two types of kids that engage in high rates of bullying. And you notice that I said kids that engage in high rates of bullying because I don't necessarily want to call them the bullies, but we only have 90 minutes. And if I have to say kids that engage in high rates of bullying every time, you're not going to get much content. So those kids that engage in high rates of bullying have two types. You have the ineffective aggressor, the thug. That one kid that has no theory of mind has limited social skills. And these are the kids that are rejected actually from the popular peer groups, right? These are the kids that other kids will stand up against and actually report them to the principal. So principals, if you're in here, you have the ineffective aggressor sitting in your office. What you do not have sitting in your office is what's called the effective aggressor. The kid that has heightened theory of mind, has really charismatic social skills. Those are ones that were actually honing their skills in some of our prevention programs. Those kids that are popular, those kids that maintain the code of silence, and those kids will never be turned into a principal. They will never, unless the norm is such to shift that norm. So essentially, what do we know? The kids that are the ineffective aggressors, yes? Oh, I saw somebody raise their hand. I was like, wow, okay, participatory. And so probably just stretching. It's good to stretch. And so we have to recognize that even good kids with really good personalities that are very athletic and popular can engage in these behaviors. If we think that it's just the ineffective aggressor, then what we're going to do is just, we're going to speed up what we call that school to prison pipeline. And we're going to point the finger at those kids that are already marginalized in our schools. There's also this notion that bullies need to be punished. Absolutely not. This phenomenon is a societal problem. And only now in 2014 are we recognizing that everybody needs to come to the table. Not just the schools, but the after-school programs, faith-based organizations, all of these things. And the reality is, is we have to own this problem. That we have context and environments like schools and sport that promote mean and cruel behavior. And simply telling kids to not be mean and cruel is not going to change this phenomenon. And simply, as you guys are voting in a criminalization of cyberbullying, criminalize all you want. But if kids do not know how to make better decisions, and all we're doing is putting them in the way, remember the school to prison pipeline. Kids that make bad decisions around bullying and cyberbullying usually have low parental involvement, low parental monitoring. So who are we picking on? We're already picking on high-stress families, right? And kids that, unfortunately, are making decisions on their own. Makes me so sad to think that we're going to lock these kids up when their brain's not developing and they're making bad decisions. We've all made bad decisions. How many of us under the current climate might be in juvie? I don't know. I just said that on radio, didn't I? My mom's going to be like, can you stop already, it's worth it. It's, you know, there's different trajectories in life. But also this idea that in two decades, I have had two, maybe three parents admit that their child engages in these behaviors that we call bullying. Until we recognize that good kids, kids that we raise can engage in this behavior, we're going to continue to have unfortunate, unfortunate failing prevention programs. Now that we're all on the same page, and the media's telling you all the wrong stuff, we can drill a little deeper. We're also quite obsessed in the world, in our society, in our schools, amongst superintendents, what is bullying? Right? Because parents will call everything bullying from rolling of eyes and sighing in the class. And we're a little obsessed with trying to define it in a way. The federal government, Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Education, two weeks ago, released a research definition. A research definition. Because they didn't want to touch a policy definition because it's so nebulous and it's really murky. But from a research definition, we think that bullying is a form of aggression that tends to be repeated over time, tends to be repeated, high likelihood of being repeated. Teachers, administrators, if you're waiting for it to be repeated, that is not a good practice. Let's assume it's going to be repeated. In fact, it's mean and cruel behavior, not a one-off fight. It also is intentional. Yes, very intentional. I go after you, this is what my motive is, really. And it is clearly an important power differential, which I'll talk a little bit more about. What, when I say to administrators, be careful about the repetition, the reason I say this is because kids change their behavior when they're being victimized. Kids stop riding the school bus. They stop going to lunch. They eventually drop out of sport. They don't walk down that certain hallway. They stop going to school, right? So if you're looking for it to repeat, you're not recognizing that kids change their behavior to reduce the likelihood that it would be repeated again. If you have a kid sitting in your classroom during lunch working on a science project, it should be a red flag that something might be going on. These are the types of things we need to consider. Now, when we think about the definition, from my standpoint, and the colleagues around me that are really grappling, well, what really is it, is it different than aggression? From the victim standpoint, if you have a kid that doesn't wanna go to school or is dropping out of sport or dropping out of music because they're being victimized, they're being victimized, let's move on from it. Unfortunately, in some ways in 1993, I brought the word bullying to the United States or re-energized it. And I apologize to everyone for that. But it's the buzzword, it's the sexy word. Everybody wants to have a symposium on bullying when in fact it's mean, cruel behavior or it's other types of behaviors. And so I said this to USA Today last year and received a lot of really interesting emails from people across the United States. And they actually weren't very nice, actually. They were very mean. And I was like, that's kind of, that could be bullying, but actually it's just mean, cruel behavior is what you just said to me. And they called me really not so nice names. So, and all I was saying is, let's just call it what it is. If somebody is calling me names or I'm being victimized, if it's aggressive, call it that behavior, mean, cruel behavior. If in fact it's disrespectful, we do that pretty well. If it's sexual harassment, we have legislation against that that's actually illegal. So calling something bullying when in fact it is unwanted sexual commentary or sexual rumor spreading or posting of my genitals somewhere that's kind of wrong and it's illegal and let's call it what it is. What about racism, right? This whole bullying umbrella really does kind of mask some of the inappropriate behaviors that really kind of violate our civil rights as well. And if it's violence, call it violence. If it's sexual assault, call it sexual assault. That's all I was saying, okay? Now this, some recent research that we've done, it's very, very clear that there, and I put this as a new slide for this week, because practitioners and teachers are resonating with this, right? So if a kid comes to you and says I'm being bullied, you usually say what's happening, right? So can we teach kids to just say they're, you know, not passing the ball to me in four square on the playground. They're calling me names, they're doing this and that, right? So we wanna specifically ask what exactly is happening to you, but then also, do you feel that the individuals have more power than you? Do you feel helpless? In our research, if kids say I'm being bullied, this is what's happening, I'm being victimized, we go to the next question and they say yes. They are more popular and I have no power to kinda defend myself, then that increases the risk, right? If kids say no, no, no, I feel like I'm okay, you still wanna watch them, but that number two, the power down, that increases the rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality, okay? The third question is where you better go into a deep mental health screening right now in referral. If I'm saying I'm being victimized, I feel powerless and I feel like I have no one around to help me, you better keep that child in your office and get a referral ASAP, because when you do look at the suicides in this country, if in fact, those questions had been asked of those kids that were very isolated, that were withdrawn and not talking to their parents anymore, if in fact at third point we had intervened, it would be a different story, okay? And certainly these kids withdraw so much that it's sometimes hard to reach out to them, but we have to do a better job of understanding these phenomena. So many administrators are dismissives of this, they really are dismissive of it and we need to be more hyper-vigilant around these issues. So when we think about bullying prevalence, although it's gone down in some states in some countries, we continue to have about 15% of our kids that are chronically victimized from third to eighth grade, and it's sad to say that some of those numbers, you could actually change that slide to be pre-K through eighth grade. It's emerging in younger, younger, younger populations and that's unfortunate, but we have to track that a little better. That's about 60 times a month, so this is in a USA Today quote of lifetime, this is in the past month, this has happened to me 60 times. 17% of our third through eighth graders are what we call the ringleader bullies. Bullying is a group phenomenon I've written quite about, about this quite a bit over the last two decades, and in fact, kids play different roles in these bully groups and some go along with the bully, kind of just sit back and watch, and some recent work by Bob Ferris has actually shown that it's not the ringleader that's doing most of the bullying that in fact, it's the kid that wants to get to the top of that hierarchy in middle school, kind of doing the dirty work for the group. So this is a group phenomenon. It's your intervention and prevention programs really addressing the group phenomenon and that's where peers and high school students themselves and youth movements will make a difference because they're really probably the only ones that can shift the peer norm because we're not able to do it as researchers, I can tell you that without the help of middle and high school students. 8% of our kids are the bully victims and for nurses in here and social workers, these are probably your clients and these are the kids that are showing up in your nurses office chronically. These are kids that have had a history of being victimized, become aggressive themselves and it doesn't take a psychologist to understand that if you are being victimized and you choose to identify with your oppressor and become aggressive yourself, you will have compromised mental health issues. This is the cycle of violence that is very, very clear in bullying and bullying victimization, this is not an isolated phenomenon. And then 60% of the students are bystanders or upstanders or allies or whatever term we wanna use and we've been saying that for a really long time. It's only now that we're recognizing that we need to empower these bystanders but we're gonna talk about the research behind that. It's not as simple as empowering the bystanders and putting quotes around it that in fact, we need to recognize the developmental psychology behind going against a popular group and changing the norms around intervention. Okay, you guys okay? Yes, all right, okay. We're gonna start flying through different types of research addendas just so that many of your objectives that you want to make sure that you meet today we talk about and so there's this obsession with cyber bullying or cyber aggression and you can imagine the definitions are even more challenging in this area. What I wanna leave you with today is that you need to understand that these are fluid phenomena and that in fact, face-to-face bullying and mean and cruelness spills right over into the social network worlds where the kids live. I encourage you to Dana Boyd just wrote her book called It's Complicated. I have not read it but I've been following her tweets and it looks as if she's trying to calm the parents and say that technology is not a bad thing for kids so it's complicated, kinda cute, right? Okay, so let's show you some national data here. This is some of Michelle Yabar's work growing up with media studies of nationally representative 12 through 18 year olds and what I want you to pay attention to, I'm gonna try to use this little thing. Yeah, okay. What we asked them is when they were experienced victimization, where is it happening? And if you notice right here, in person is 39%, okay? By phone, 10%, text messaging, 14%, 17% online and 10% some other way. Now, many of the smart folks in here are gonna wanna add these numbers up and say well it's more than face-to-face, you can't do it. These are not mutually exclusive, right? Because I can get you through my phone, tweet, tweet, Facebook, Form Spring, all of that's not mutually exclusive. What's important here is that the majority of kids have not been victimized at all, right? So that's zero domains. 21% have been victimized in one of these domains and then even smaller across multiple domains. So it is very likely that this 21% is actually face-to-face. Until we fix the issues of kids being mean and cruel in schools face-to-face, they will continue to be mean and cruel when they pick up technology. We cannot see this as too distinct phenomenon. It's a mode. For some of us that wrote notes, do you remember writing notes in high school? Yes, the kids are like, what are you talking about? Yeah, we wrote notes, okay? And we hope that the teacher didn't find the note because we were probably spreading some rumor. I don't remember, it's been a long time. But so if we were doing that face, that was our mode, right? If we were doing it face-to-face, then we would put it on a note on our bathroom wall. I'm so dating myself and it's okay. I'm very secure with that. Okay, so now when we ask kids, when it does happen online or through electronic, where is it happening? At home, 83%. This slide I showed to parents and when parents say to me, I'm not getting on Facebook. I don't have time for Facebook. I'm not gonna police my child's technology. You should. They're doing it in your home. It's happening in the home. If we don't partner with parents, we will continue to fail. And parents are getting it. They're starting to get it. They're a little stressed out by it. They barely could manage their non-technology parental monitoring. Now they'll have to put this on top of it, right? So we just, we're all, we gotta work together. We also have to recognize that kids are still experiencing victimization online in school. And these are the schools where the teachers say, well, you know, they just have to learn to be responsible. I'm like, they're 11. No, brain doesn't develop till 25. We need to, yeah. Well, you know, then we have other schools where they find them. If their cell phone's on, I'm like, they're 11. They're not, they're gonna turn their phone on, right? So this is a lot, this is kind of data and you should just kind of know that it's happening in your homes and you should, all of you out there partner with parent groups and really, really help them understand that they might think they're monitoring their child's Facebook, but their child has two Facebook accounts. And what Dana Boy does say and other people say is that your children show you the Facebook account. They're not really doing all the hot, heavy action on Facebook. They're doing it on Twitter, right? I'm telling you all your secrets, right? And you can tell me I'm wrong. Cause you're on Yic Gac or something, okay? So essentially more than 80% of youth who use the internet are not cyberbullied, okay? So in some ways we want to kind of calm down. 75% who are bullied and harassed actually are not very upset. When we do focus groups, kids will de-friend, they will report, they will stop communicating with some creepy person in instant messaging, you know? They make relatively good decisions. We should be concerned about 8%. Now if you remember we had 8% of those kids that indicated were bully victims. We are concerned about the 8% that seem to be getting it from all directions, online, face to face. And from a clinical sense, when we look at our data, we're concerned that these are kids that have low parental monitoring and are going into unsafe spaces repeatedly over time, right? So they may have attachment issues. They may just not have enough parental monitoring to know that that's an unsafe space because they've had prior victimization. And so, you know, clinically we think we know who those kids are. And you should know that text messaging victimization is certainly increasing in this country. If one trend is happening, it's text messaging victimization, okay? So now I'm gonna show you, and I do a lot of heavy quantitative research. So if anybody wants to move to Illinois and get a PhD, you can come and just bring your uggs, you'll be fine. And we'll keep you busy. So what I'm going to show you through is a series of studies. And I don't want you to freak out and like your eyes roll in the back, oh my gosh, these are like structural equation modeling because I'm gonna walk you through it, okay? I'm gonna walk you through it. It's gonna be really great. So what we wanted to look at is I had made an argument for a really long time that if we continue to work with kids face to face and give them social emotional learning strategies to deal with conflict and minimize the escalation of conflicts that this would spill over to the use of technology. And so folks were like, well, do you have data to back that up? That's what my colleagues say. And I was like, yes, of course we do. And so we tracked kids. We do a lot of studies where we just track kids from fifth to sixth grade up into high school to see the overlap of all these different types of victimization. And so this is the data I'm gonna show you. And this is about 1,100 fifth, sixth, and seventh graders. And in some cases we follow them for four waves, so the same kids. This is diverse for Illinois, 51% black and 34% white. Small percentage Hispanic, so different than California demographics, but we'll give you some idea. Woo, this is when I feel my age because I have no idea what's in those circles. So luckily I made them. So I will walk this through here. So this is, imagine groups of kids, right? Fifth and sixth graders traveling through time in middle school, beautiful time, beautiful time. And this is the extent to which they're engaging in what we call garden variety bullying, name calling because of certain attributes, rumor spreading, exclusion. And this is time one, two, three, and four. And what we see in then here is the extent to which they engage in this behavior toward others online, right? So cyber bullying perpetration. This is what's called a causal model. If you engage in high rates of bullying that's face to face, over time, you will engage in bullying online, okay? That's simple. You're doing it face to face, you're gonna do it right here, okay? And for the stats, folks in the room, this is a beautiful, beautiful pit closest to zero and it's 0.05 in case you can't see it, but this is truth, truth, truth. Now, watch this. Now what we have is we have the extent to which I'm being victimized face to face and whether or not I become a perpetrator online. Now, everyone should say this is beautiful because we see lines cross. I'm victimized six months later, I go online. Guess what happens? People know because it's not anonymous when I do the stuff online. I become a victim at school again and then I bully online. This is a transactional pattern. This is for any principal in here, this is your Monday morning, right? Because it started on Friday, whatever it was, face to face, it continued at the football game, it went online Saturday and Sunday and then your Monday morning, that's why I never do school visits on a Monday morning. Never do I show up at a school on a Monday morning because this is what they're dealing with. When I show this to them, they're like, that's truth. I was like, yes. But it's every week for you, not just this kind of model. Now, for those that wanna understand the mean girl phenomenon, which is not just a mean girl phenomenon in relational aggression, that in fact that rumor spreading, exclusion, I'm not gonna be your friend unless you do what I say. Boys and girls do this. Girls just get a little bit upset about it. Boys do it and they move on. We hold on to things, ladies, right? And this model fits for boys and girls. If I'm in school being mean and cruel, engaging in the mean girl, mean boy phenomenon, I actually will then go online, engage in these behaviors. And this connection is phenomenal because that's two years later that it predicted out. This is beautiful, beautiful research. This isn't USA Today material. This is New York Times material. So consistently we find the support between the transactional analysis and associations between face to face and online. So when you have limited resources in school and you say I'm going to do, I'm going to have the attorney general come in and talk about cyber bullying and talk about the legalization of this, that's fine. I think they need to hear it and they need to hear over and over again that they're gonna get themselves in trouble if they make bad decisions. But we don't recognize that if we're not really improving the ways in which kids interact on a daily basis, we will continue to have these problems despite the criminalization because kids will make bad decisions, especially when they don't have adults to turn to monitor some of their behaviors. Okay, so we have some sense of the definitions. We know that there's a fluid connection between face to face and online. So how are we doing with bullying prevention? This is perhaps some of the saddest part of my talk because I have to expose the reality and the reality is many of you are probably adopting programs that are not effective. And it's not your fault, see, because they're marketed to you saying that they're proven. It says it's proven on their website. I have colleagues that are PhD scholars endowed chairs that are pushing programs that are not effective. That's really cheery, Dorothy, really, really cheery. There's such limited data that the first meta-analysis was in 2008. Yet we have had proven programs on the national registry since 1997. Why is that? It's because people are making money off of the bullying craze. And so what did this research show? We found Ken Merrill, who's no longer with us, but a school psychologist and many of you probably use his depression and anxiety materials for kids, identified 16 studies. You should know that six of the studies were the United States and only two of the US, six US studies were published. If you know anything about being a professor, you have to publish to keep your job, right? To be on the national registry, you have to publish and show efficacy and replication of evidence-based. We throw evidence-based out there like we know what evidence-based is, okay? Most, right? We say that, we say trauma-informed and evidence-based. We have all these terms. And then you're like, well, what does evidence-based mean to you? If you actually look at the definition of how to get to evidence-based, we probably have not too many evidence-based programs because it's hard to do. But that said, they found no, no reduction in bullying behavior at all. Now, being kind of an optimist that I try to be, time to time, I went into that meta-analysis and said, what if we lift the P value? So we are not gonna make five out of 100 mistakes. We're gonna make 10 out of 100 mistakes. What did we find? Found that those programs that we're working toward enhancing social competence and peer acceptance and increasing teacher knowledge and efficacy. Critical, critical, critical. Who's in those classrooms with those kids day in and day out, the teachers? We have not understood the teacher's role in bullying prevention in the classroom. This suggested that those programs that addressed that were going in the direction of efficacy. Let's go down now to 2009, 2010. The Campbell Collaboration conducts meta-analysis. They've now looked at about 44 studies. And they found that those programs that are effective in European countries, we're not in a European country, actually used multimedia, incorporated the parents and targeted teachers' competence. But if you look deep into that meta-analysis, you'll see that in the United States we have the lowest effect sizes. Meaning that we are not necessarily reducing bullying and victimization to the tune of 17 to 23% like our peers in Europe. But one of the programs that you probably are using in your school is the Norwegian program. And the Norwegian program is no longer on the national registry. Because there's no data in the United States to support the always bullying prevention program. Yet it's being marketed all over our country. And that's on radio. And Dan, who developed that program, will email me within the next hour, I'm sure. So what do we need to do? The reality is that we could, way back in the day, remember when we had tons of resources before no child left behind and we just school boards could buy things and we could just ask teachers to do things and they had time to do things and they weren't burnt out or stressed out. I remember those days, it was good times. That's not where we're at. We're with no child left behind, high accountability. I can't convince a principal sometimes that 50 minutes talking to kids about non-academic soft skills would be a good thing for them, right? The reality is we had to regroup and say we do not need a prevention program for every type of violence. We do not need a prevention program for a divorce, for alcohol and drugs, for this, for this. We don't have time for that. So what we did was we backed up and I've said in the literature a lot saying, okay, we know that there is a group of risk and protective factors that predict alcohol and drug use among adolescents, teenage pregnancy, violence, truancy. We know this. Can we capture that and try to create programs, frameworks, that will address a multitude of issues that overlap anyway? And so that's where we started to go when we found out, in fact, that the programs were failing. We also need to recognize that a lot of the bullying and the violence that we're talking about, whether it's homophobic name-calling, whether it's sexual violence, teen dating violence, it's driven by the youth. They're driving it. You guys are driving it. You need to help us, right? Because we, they have code of silence. They get their own culture. They're running the schools. Do you understand this? They're running the schools. And so we have to work together to change the social peer norm because if the peers in a particular school, if the norm is to be exclusive and to be mean and to be clicky and to isolate certain populations, that explains almost 100% of the variance in the outcomes. That's huge. And most of the time we're taking in curriculum, handing it to the teacher with very little training and the students are like over-programmed. By the time our students get to college, they have had four to six violence prevention programs. They are tuned out. They're like, your adultism is getting very irritating. In the older I get, the less they want to listen to me. I'm just saying. So we need to think much more clearly about this, but it's not all about just, you know, let the youth go rogue either. Like there has to be a coordination. And that's where I think we're at with some of the social movements. You know, I'd like to think that Lady Gaga's 17th bus. I thought for sure that was going to knock it all out. She's got a 17th bus. She's going to help people. Lady Gaga has put her foot down. No, I don't know. Sorry, Lady Gaga. She'll be like, well, we also have to recognize that United States is quite diverse, right? So if we're looking to Norway to figure out what's going to work in the area of bullying prevention, anybody been to Norway? Okay, thank you. Very different than the United States, right? Now, I mean, demographic you can look at and my colleagues say, well, we have violence too in Norway and we have an immigration problem too. Okay, well, you have teachers that are highly respected, highly paid and have an equivalent of a master's degree and they compete for those jobs, right? They're very well respected. When you ask a Norwegian teacher to implement a curriculum, they're like, yes. Yes, thank you very much. Well, you come by and make sure that I'm doing. I really want to help you. I got to feed American teachers. I got to pay them and I have to show up and make sure that they're doing what they said they would do, right? Not all of you, but most of you because you're stressed out and I feel your plight. So we need to understand like even what works in Chicago public schools in my state it's not going to work downstate. California is a big state, right? Context matters, demographics matter. And so we also have to recognize that there is a great issue around using kind of these canned programs around classroom management. We are failing to put really well equipped teachers in our classroom. And most of the time the teachers that have effective classroom management they learn it on the job. They're not necessarily learning it in university and I come out of a college of education. So my Dean is like, Dorothy, what are you saying? I'm just like, we give them theory. We don't really prepare them for all the ills that they're going to deal with in the classroom. Let's just own it. Can we just own it that families are stressed out and the families are stressing the kids out and the kids come into the classroom and the teacher says I'm not a social worker and I was like, I don't really, let's think about that. You're not? I'm thinking you might be in today's society. I'm thinking. And so we have to recognize classroom management matters. And so what we're starting to do with some of our programs is to coach with teachers and co-implement, right? So you have that support. We give less support to teachers than we do to many, many professionals as they go through their tenure. Okay, so this is where I start to tell this story and I'm in California. I love telling this story in California because I know you're not going to walk out. For the most part, I'm pretty sure. In Colorado Springs, it's not always the same. So we started to do some interviews and we were very much concerned with when we were interviewing kids that the language, what we call homophobic name-calling and epithets was increasing. There was around 2000 that we started to 2000. It's now 2014, so you can tell it's been a long battle. About 2000, the kids started saying, yeah, they call me, Fag, Dyke. They do this relentlessly. And you inquiry about their sexual orientation and they said, I don't really know. I'm sixth grader and I like to play Wii. I don't know. I mean, I'm very confused. And then we started to talk to seventh graders that experienced the same phenomenon. I was like, well, how do you manage that? Well, I sexually harass a girl publicly, if it's a boy, so that they, because it's heteronormative around here, so that they would just stop calling me their names. I just publicly take care of that, right? Increasingly, we started to do some studies where we found that gender non-conforming youth and LGBT youth were not having such a good experience in our schools. We identified that they had high risk of suicide alleys, depression and anxiety. I went on the road with this. I've been escorted out of many small towns when they think that I'm promoting homosexuality, when, in fact, I was just trying to save the children. So that strategy didn't necessarily work because if you believe that an alternative sexual orientation to heterosexuality is a bad thing, then you could just say, of course, they're depressed, anxious and suicidal. They're engaging in wrongful behavior, right? So they started to use my research in such a not a great way. When, in fact, I just wanted kids to stop using the language. I really just thought that since we didn't use the N word and we've now banned the R word to refer to students with disabilities, I thought maybe we could just get the teachers and adults to say, we don't use that language here. That would be, if I could just get everybody to do that, I would really, I might retire. I don't know, just don't use the language. So that approach wasn't working. And I remember in 2005, I said to my former student who's now a great, great professor at Boston College and saving the world over there on the East Coast, I said, why don't we just, can we demonstrate? Is there a way to demonstrate that the kids who are perhaps questioning or gender non-conforming or LGBT, can we create, not just that they're suicidal, depressed, anxious, but can we demonstrate that in fact their social support system is compromised? So we did this study, we asked two simple questions, two simple questions. And we do it in every school and I encourage you to do it in your school and feed the data back to the kids. You guys, ask your fellow mates these two questions and see anonymously, see how they answer. Watch this, it's brilliant. It was the fastest publication published because I think the editor was just so shocked by the results that he was just like, we gotta put this in print. So we asked, how much do you agree or disagree with? I could never stay friends with someone who told me he or she was gay or lesbian. This was in 2009, we've replicated this in 2013. Now you should also know that these are Dane County data, anybody from Wisconsin? Woo, Dane County, that includes Madison, one of the most liberal places in the Midwest, right? Highest percentage of LGBT politicians in Dane County, they're in Madison. So we're talking about, you know, this isn't San Francisco, but it's kinda close, right? So I could never stay friends with someone who told me he or she was gay or lesbian. Now, I'm gonna show you that in fact, one out of three seventh graders right there agreed or strongly agreed with that statement. You should know it's one out of two if you look at the boys. One out of two said I would never remain friends. We feed these data back to the kids. Very instantly when I say, what is your name? Jackson, Jackson, I want you to pretend that you are a seventh grader. These are your data. Jackson, defend boys. Why would you not remain friends with someone who's gay? You're a seventh grader. What grade are you in now, Jackson? You're a senior. Just go back. Remember five years ago, go back, yeah. Have a visual. They're different, he's different, but he's friends with you, right? So you've been friends for a long time. It's unappealing to have a friend that's gay, uncomfortable. Any other reason, Jackson? You're seventh grade, remember seventh grade? Middle school. It's contagious, somebody said. Love that. Like how the women rescue you. There you are. That's what we do, okay? Anybody else? Yes, if I hang out with them, they'll think, yeah, a real seventh grader has no problem coming up with the reasons why, right? The narcissistic seventh grade boy also adds, he might want me. Increasingly, when you work with LGBT youth and gender non-, LGBT youth, one of the big frustrations is that they think that everybody, you know, they want everybody. And what they say to me is, not my type. Okay, not my type, jeez. But what's encouraging though, is when you show the numbers here by 12th grade, it's 10% because Jackson, you're like, okay. You're like, it's cool, right? Yeah, so there is a developmental, but it's key that we need to focus down here folks, if not even earlier, right? Okay, second question. This one really should make us feel optimistic about our youth culture, right? I would rather attend a school where there are no gay, lesbian students. One out of two, okay? Now, this approach has worked very well across the country, as opposed to just saying all these bad mental health outcomes. Certainly we can publish that stuff and make sure that we have legislation to protect certain youth. But if you want to understand, if your school has a culture in which kids are not being accepted because they don't even have to be gay, right? They could just be gender non-conforming. They could be assumed lesbian gay. Who knows? They could be like in drama. They could be taking ballet classes. It's the gender non-conforming stuff. If you want to know, ask the students these questions. Use your youth advisory board. I'll give you this survey, do it, tabulate it, bring it back to them. One of the most powerful, and this is happening all the time when I'm presenting, I went into a small town and brought their data into this town and it was seven through 12th grade. They were all in the gym. And when I have kids come in, I watch them. I see who has social capital. I see who's popular. And I was like watching this one cheerleader. And then I was thinking like, I wanted to be a cheerleader, but I could never be a cheerleader. I spoke my mind too much to be a cheerleader in Virginia. So all of a sudden I put this data up and she pops up real fast. And she said, you make me sick. I said, this is good. This is good, I don't know where it's going. She said, my uncle is gay and I cannot believe you would not want him here. I said, my work is done because she has high social capital. Within a week, she went to the school board, they principle and said, I want to start a gay straight alliance. I'm appalled at the data. And they said no. And they said, you can have it, but don't call it that. So she said, fine. She created the Tree Club. Tolerance and respect for education inequity. And I was like, go girl, right? Right, good. So yeah, that's what keeps me on the road and keeps me in hotels and keeps me just inspired to keep doing this work and change lives. Here's, there's certainly a book here you could read. I think you can get it on Amazon for a dollar. It's really helpful. So when we think about social ecological perspective, it's a framework that we've used. I'm often asked, mostly by hairdressers, who have a picture of their child right there, right? And they say, why? You have to imagine like they like have scissors and a comb. And they say, why do kids do this? And I say, well, I adopt a social ecological framework in which, and still standing there, right? And this is where kids can have an individual propensity toward being a victim or a perpetrator or a bystander, an ineffective bystander. They could have mental, I mean, kind of issues, childhood issues, attachment issues. They could have ADHD that places them at risk for being kind of reactively aggressive. They could be on the spectrum in which they may not know how to join into social groups and they might irritate other children, those types of things. But it's not a deterministic model. Now she's still standing there, okay? My hair is drying as I'm answering this question. And she, and I said, but you know, it's not a deterministic model because if they come from a really supportive family, and I think I throw in like them that show parenthood or something. And then I talk about, you know, if they go to a supportive school, you know, all of these types of contexts then contribute to the cumulative risk or protective factors of a kid being involved in bullying. And that's about 50 articles I just summarized for you. And she's still like, oh, okay, well, I was just wondering because my seven-year-old son is experiencing victimization, right? I no longer tell hairdressers what I do. I say that I'm a microbiologist and they're like, oh, and what do you study? I was like, Salmonella. Never do they query about the Salmonella problems in the United States. So if you sit next to me on a plane, I'm a microbiologist, right? I have learned, learned, learned. So oftentimes we look at meta-analysis to understand what the body of literature says. And essentially there's lots of things that I could point out in the next 45 minutes that I have. Is that what I have, George? Yeah, okay. But this one I really wanted to point out, this is a meta-analysis conducted by Clay Cook, about 153 studies for the students in the room or those that want to go back and come to Illinois with me and get a PhD. You wanna always find the meta-analytic study. The meta-analytic study summarizes a body of literature. If you get that one study, then you'll get 153 studies. Your work is done, essentially, right? So Clay summarized, along with his colleagues, 153 studies since 1970 to say, what do we know? So overall, not surprising, kids that engage in high rates of bullying have significant externalizing behavior that's called tautological, like it's like a no-brainer. Yeah, it's by the definition. They have social competence and academic challenges. Remember, these are the ineffective aggressors. So he's tapping that ineffective aggressor and I'm gonna show you where the effective aggressor shows up. They have negative attitudes towards others and a family characterized by conflict and that is certainly true in our research that we have shown. If kids are in homes in which their siblings are aggressive towards them, they will be aggressive in school. Sibling aggression is often a proxy for family violence, do not be confused by that. But when these kids then go to middle school, we see an interaction. And I'm gonna say it two different ways, hoping that one of the ways makes sense to you. Yeah, so as kids become adolescents, about fifth and sixth grade, adolescents who bully have higher peer status than children who bully others. Those kids in fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth grade that are engaging in these high rates of mean and cruel behavior are nominated by their friends as popular. Up until the fifth grade, the peer group rejects those kids. We have a mechanism up until about the fourth or fifth grade that if you're mean and cruel for the most part, may not be true in your school, but for the most part, the kids will reject you. You will not be part of the popular peer group. This behavior then becomes a way in which kids establish dominance in fifth and sixth and seventh grade and they're popular. This idea that we think that social rejection and peer rejection is taking care of this is absolutely not true. We have to recognize that those very sophisticated kids that have theory of mind know how to turn this behavior on and off when you come in the room, know who to target and know who to target repeatedly, that we have to understand this is part of our society and socialization, right? Very, very, very powerful work. Unfortunately, our prevention programs don't necessarily map on to that phenomenon. There's also this craze now that a number of longitudinal studies are coming out, saying that in fact, you know, bullies are on this criminal trajectory. Persistently aggressive kids are on a criminal trajectory. Kids that have a diagnosis of antisocial personality are on a criminal trajectory. That does not reflect the 100% of kids that engage in bullying behaviors. What we do know from recent research is that kids that are chronically victimized are likely to have full blown diagnosis of depression, anxiety and PTSD. That's the trauma that we're talking about today. That is real, that is long term. So when I have adults that come to me and say I have struggled since elementary school and middle school, the research now backs that up. Adults that are struggling with depression, anxiety, PTSD and other types of anxiety disorders as adults who feel it's connected to their victimization, the research supports that. The only thing kids, the connection between being on a bully perpetrator in outcomes is the antisocial personality diagnosis. And some of us have antisocial personality traits, okay? Right, so that, last week, this was one of the most beautiful longitudinal things and some of you heard this, that homophobes die earlier. Did you hear this? If you're homophobic, your health, did you see this? I said yes, between that and the Pope, I'm having a really good year. I'm just saying, yes, could we possibly? But it makes sense if you have hate, right? Hate's not good for you physically. That's why I laugh so much. People are like, are you ever serious? I said, this is serious. Listen, I'm taking care of my cardiovascular issues. I'm laughing. Laughter is good. I do not hate. Woo. Okay. Okay, you should know that there's a host of kind of correlates associated with and all involvement and bullying, and I kind of put this, and you'll have these slides, and I can send you the 120 articles in case you have something to do. I mean, you guys don't get snowed in, so you go outside and stuff. We get snowed in and read. That's all we do is read. There's also a lot of my work I've said, look. It's not complicated. I live in families. Mine's a little bit on the dysfunctional side. Again, my mom's like, what are you doing? Tell them the truth, mom. Tell them the truth. Functional families. A healthy family looks like a healthy school. An unhealthy family looks like an unhealthy school. This is the unhealthy schools. I'm in unhealthy schools. I'm in some healthy schools. And where does it rest? It often rests. The climate of a school rests with the spirit of the administrator, right? All I have to do is sit down with the principal and say, how do you run your school? And if I see the principal on the playground calling kids out by their first name, maybe getting some of them wrong with trying, I know that's a very different school than I find the principal sitting in his or her office afraid to go out of it. That's not voting well, right? So leadership and monitoring matters. Relationships matter. School climate matters. Healthy family is a healthy school. Oftentimes kids spend more time at school than they do with their family. We need to really recognize that schools are raising our children and we need to work together. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that. And this is a, not a complicated paper, but I'm gonna make it pretty easy. I'm gonna break it down. You're gonna be like, wow. Like my mom says, did we know that you had to do a study to show that? Really? Isn't that like kind of obvious? Thank you, mom. That's right. My mother, the waitress, I was like, isn't waitressing just kind of obvious? Do you read what that? Anyway, love my mother. She grew up in a different time. They're like, she was like, and we pay you to do that? Yes, mom, we do. This is one of these studies. She's always my litmus test. She's like, really? Okay, all right. So we wanted to look at school climate. We talk a lot about school climate, right? That's another word we throw out, like positive school climate. What is it, right? And we can look to the center for school climate center over there and Jonathan Cohen and his four safety and relationships and all that stuff. From my standpoint, and I had a theory about this and the data totally showed up, that I believe that if an administrator believes in his or her teachers and gives them opportunities to talk about violence, safety issues, that chases that moving target and sends a message to the kids that we may not be perfect, but we're trying, that I bet kids are less aggressive and more willing to intervene. And oh my goodness, I was right, right? So here's a study, here's a, talking about school culture, it matters, and Kayson was doing this 10, a decade ago, talking about the importance of school climate and culture and it was associated with less bullying. In this study, what we wanted to do was to go in and survey all the staff across 36 schools and then survey the kids. So don't ask the kids what they thought about the climate but actually talk to the staff and the teachers about what was happening in their building and then see the extent to which that mapped on to the kids' behavior, right? Two multi-informants. It's beautiful design, beautiful. So we went into 35 of the 36 middle schools, we collected about 1,400 responses to the survey, including a lot of teachers, and I'll flip through that. Okay, so what were the scales? Again, the staff, teachers, custodians, bus drivers, whoever, administrators completed the survey and there were scales. We wanted to know the extent to which students intervened when there was bullying or violence, right? This is their perception. Do you see students intervening? Do you see staff intervening? And there are multiple items, so you just have to understand psychometrically strong good stuff, okay? Do you think there's aggression as a problem in your school? Then we also said, do you have opportunities? Something that we're calling a commitment toward violence prevention approaches, right? Are there professional development opportunities? Do you have in services? Do you have an advisory board with youth on it that address this? Do you involve parental involvement around school violence? And then we have the warm touchy, we like each other here, we respect each other, okay? So these are all the scales that the staff filled out. And now, this is hierarchical linear modeling. You should just know that it's really, really strong. I'm showing you the coefficients here. My theory was right. Once you put all of those six scales in, the one scale that predict and accounted for 80% of the variance in the outcomes was the staff saying, we have opportunities to address violence prevention. My administrator backs me up when we have issues in my classroom. We involve parents in this conversation. You should know those 36 schools, those schools had 75% free and reduced lunch. I'm not in the fluent schools. The fluent schools won't let me come in. It's okay. They've got enough resources. It's fine. It's mutual. Not that I'm anything against the fluent schools, but they're high resource. That's not where I need to be. So these are schools in Chicago public schools, Wichita, Kansas, downstate Illinois. These are low resource schools where the staff say they care. And what do the kids say? Less bullying, less victimization, less fighting. Now, if anybody knows correlations, these are not bike vary correlations. These are actually coefficients. So this is remarkable. And this is with all those other things put in. Oh my goodness. Isn't this great? Because I sensed that in my studies, when I had a principal that would sit with me with their advisory group and say, we want to do this. Let's make this work. And there's bumps along the road, but we don't quit. When the staff and teachers feel supported, it feels like a no brainer, right? That's when my mom was like, really? It's climate. It's a work climate. Yes, but it's trickling to the student behavior. So if anything, do something. People often say to me, aren't schools doing something? No, there are still schools that are doing absolutely nothing. Zero, except teaching to the test, taking tests, recovering from the test, okay? Do something so that the kids will say they're trying. It's not perfect, but they're trying. Now, as you recall, I was talking a bit about LGBT youth and gender non-conforming youth. And in parts of our country, there's still a pushback about that. Because if you talk to kids or even ask them their sexual orientation, they might turn gay, because I never thought about it. Maybe I am. This is where it becomes stand-up comedy, which it should not. No, inappropriate. And so in some cases, I've had to do some work to show that it's more than homosexuality in our schools. That in fact, if we have environments that are restrictive in their gendered box, so if boys have to act a certain way, traditional masculinity, and girls have to be hyper-feminized, which there is a trend toward that in this country where fourth graders are wearing makeup, that gendered box, if you step out of it and your gender non-conforming, you will be attacked. And guess what? If you are a boy throwing like a girl, that is somehow a bad thing, right? And if you're a girl, which we used to be able to be tomboys, and we could navigate all kinds of gender boxes, you can't do it anymore. And what happens is if it's a heteronormative environment, meaning that heterosexuality is the only way to express your sexual identity in that school, you deviate from that, you will be attacked, and kids then publicly have to sexually harass one another, the opposite sex. And they also not only engage in the language of you're gay and you're F-A-G, but you're also five-letter word that starts with a P. You guys work on that one, work on it. If you're being called that name, then it's denigrating girls and women, okay? So let me walk you through this. One of the, this was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. And so sometimes my message has to be in some communities that I'm trying to create a safe space for all kids. And I'm trying to get you to understand that if we do not slow down the escalation of bullying to homophobic name-calling to sexual violence to teen dating violence, we will continue to have domestic violence as adults. We will continue to have environments that are denigrating to girls and women, okay? Now men, you can take issue with that, but the reality is the Violence Against Women Act is always on the chopping table, right? And so if in fact we believe that bullying is a precursor to these other forms of violence, we better figure out what are those things that are really providing the socialization for the development of sexual harassment and teen dating violence, okay? So I developed what's called a bully sexual violence pathway. I believe that in fact bullying escalates to sexual violence through homophobic name-calling. Homophobic name-calling itself sets a precedence for the gendered box. And then we'll see that sexual violence then goes on to escalate to teen dating violence. So we're gonna look at some circles. You can look at the definitions there. We're gonna flip through that. Again, we're following these same kids. You should know that when we talk about, people really think that this garden variety bullying of name-calling is the most prevalent. We actually find that homophobic name-calling represents about 30 to 50% of the bullying in middle school. 30 to 50%. And so when we look at kids that are engaging in bullying perpetration, there's 12% of males that indicate doing this and 12% of females. Okay, lost track. Okay, percentage of youth who homophobic name-call. 34% of boys engage in this behavior on a regular basis. This is about 60 times in the last month that they have directed homophobic epithets toward friends, non-friends, people they think is gay, some of them they don't know, some of them they don't like. Now what's interesting about these data is one out of three, right, this is chronically doing this, others participated at different levels. What do you think the most common target is? Who do you think are doing these? When I say friends, non-friends, friends, exactly, that's right, very much so. So then teachers will say, well, isn't that just their bantering? Yeah, it is. And it's actually very inappropriate. And if you talk to the victims who are friends supposedly with the person that's directing that in that group, it makes them wonder. It hurts their feelings. They don't like it. And the bottom line is if that language is happening, it doesn't matter if it's friends or non-friends, you're creating an environment in which it's heteronormative and you're saying you better be in one of those gender boxes. And don't not misunderstand me. The girls are engaging in this policing of the masculinity as well, okay? We do it too, ladies. Okay, so just so you know, when we talk about sexual violence in middle school, we're actually talking about a lot of rumor spreading, unwanted rumor spreading in sexual commentary. We're not talking about rape and sexual assault. We're still at 1%, which 1% is still problematic, but in middle school, it's just a lot of unwanted sexual commentary. We also, when we were doing the study, did some focus group with the middle school kids and uncovered the nervous game. How many of you have heard of the nervous game? The high school students, raise your hand, Jackson. Right, Ann, your name? Asara? Asara, that's right. So don't we have some 23-year-old teachers that played the nervous game in here? Raise your hand. Be proud. It's a phenomenon. How many do not know what the nervous game is? Asara, come here. Come on. It's time for you to shine, honey. We're not gonna play the nervous game. Why don't you tell them what the nervous game is? Yes. Okay, so I'm not one for, okay. Be loud and proud. All right, well, I'm not one for really playing those kinds of games, because I normally separated myself from people who played those games because it did not make me feel comfortable. But it's pretty much where you're like, you put your hand on someone else's leg and you just kind of like, you're like, are you nervous yet? Are you nervous yet? Are you nervous? And like, you pretty much like go all until like, I don't know, up to like your area, you know. Genital area, yeah. And then until someone's finally like, oh, I'm not nervous, or like, you know, it'll be like, oh, you know, like, I'm nervous, can you stop? But it's just kind of like a very like boundary breaking, just kind of like, but in a sense, it's like, it's, there's like a fine line between being like sexual harassment and like flirting, but like it's that awkward flirting of like middle school kids. It's weird, and it should be stopped. Great, thank you. Yep. This one, thank you very much. That was very brave, and I put you on the spot, but I think that's great. Yes, so we only uncovered this because we were doing focus groups, right? So if you have the AUW sexual harassment scale, it doesn't say, do you play the nervous game? So we started talking to the kids, and we have a paper on this in Journal of School Health. Started talking to them and recognizing that one, we're title non non compliant, right? So except California is a little bit better about this. But for the most part, teachers don't understand sexual harassment and the kids, we don't talk to them about it because it's not time to talk about it. But as we dug deeper into the focus groups and as Asara was talking about, she alluded to the fact that it was a fine line between sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is unwanted, unwanted sexual commentary or touching, right? As we drill deeper into the focus groups, I remember this one seventh grade girl says, yes, we play it everywhere. We play it at school, we play it at the movie theaters, and she would change her behavior. She said, I didn't like, it made me feel uncomfortable, but I was expected to play it, right? And in her school, the longer you stayed in the game, the higher social status you would have, right? And she said, when they did it at the movie theaters, I would come in really, really late so I wouldn't have to play, right? So come right in when the movie's starting or I would go get soda pop and popcorn. And I said to her, you understand, that means you don't wanna do it. And she said, yes. And I said, the law says it's unwanted sexual commentary and touching, right? So, and this comes out of the peer groups, but we need to understand it. So I just wanna say that is why we do research because we would not know about that if we don't sit down and talk to a SAR. And she's like, high schooler looking back and saying that's silly, but that's middle school and now she's so cool in high school, she wouldn't do that. I love it. Yes, a SAR. Yeah, so, sociologist in the front row. I'm just telling you. Again, Illinois taking applications. So she said, for those of you that could not hear this brilliant commentary, she said, this is where sexism and double standards start to emerge in middle school because if you're like that badass girl that can stay in the game longer, what are you gonna be labeled? Slut, that's what she said. I have kinda goosebumps, I'm just saying, okay? This is the power of youth and strong research involvement. Okay, so what do we find? We actually find that bullying perpetration predicts sexual harassment over time two and a half years later and homophobic name-calling also predicts that over time. Now I know, I had to do just one more, right? Before you took a break and got some coffee. Now, I had heard for years from teachers that language, in fact, they don't know what it means. It doesn't mean it's benign, they mean happy. Oh, I said, okay, the only way to fight this is to go collect data. So we followed those same kids, what do we find? This is truth, another truth figure. If you engage in high rates of this generic kind of garden variety, bullying in sixth grade, and remember, sixth grade is so different than seventh grade, something happens over the summer when they come back, right, they're just, woo, seventh graders. By seventh grade, they engage in homophobic name-calling. This is causally linked. If in fact, we know that bullying is associated with the escalation of homophobic name-calling and we know that when you're target of this language, you're more likely to sexual harass your peers, bullying prevention better addressed that language and we certainly should stop talking about bullying prevention in high school and talk about sexual violence and sexism and double standards and teen dating violence. We don't need positive behavior supports in high school. We need talking about healthy relationships and teen dating violence and how we interact with one another to marginalize our youth. I exhaust myself, exhaust myself. So this will sadden you even more. Those kids that we've been talking about in eighth grade are now in 10th, 11th and 12th grade in our high school, so we've now followed them five years. And what do we find? We find that that sexual harassment perpetration on the last slide actually predicts teen dating violence perpetration in high school. Five and a half years later that we see a link between family conflict, sibling aggression, through delinquent delinquent fears, through bullying perpetration to sexual harassment perpetration to teen dating violence. If this bubble here is, I'm going to give you a definition of bullying, I'm going to tell you about the different types of bullying and you better just cut it out or I'm going to call your parents. If this doesn't talk about homophobic language, gender identity, the ways in which boys and girls treat one another, we will never prevent this, we will not prevent that. Bullying predicts teen dating violence through homophobic name calling and sexual harassment. Let's be Title IX compliant, let's give kids the opportunity to talk about gender. Are you a teacher and do you do gender in your classroom? And if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, we can talk. Now let's get real, that film today is going to help you and the follow up film to that straight laced will even help you more. High school students, if you haven't seen straight laced, show it in your high school, show it in your high school, make the adults watch it and address their internal biases around gender because gender isn't boy, girl, gender isn't he, she. Gender identity is fluid, the youth know it's fluid, we need to get our act together and give them the opportunity to talk about the pressure they have to be the girly girl or to be the stoic restrictive emotion boy. Okay, that's our responsibility, we have failed you when we, I'm trying, okay, trying, I'm trying. So certainly there's a link between bullying and homophobic name calling. We also know that bullying and sexual violence is also moderated by traditional masculinity. If you are a boy or a girl that believes that boys have to be stoic and they should talk about their sexual prowess and they should not display any emotion except anger, then you will, bully will escalate to sexual harassment perpetration. Now that's a good finding because we can address traditional masculinity. We can talk to boys about multiple masculinities. We do a lot of work with ethnic minorities and African-Americans and gangs. When we talk to these, we have another paper out on that. And we talk to African-American kids and they feel that the only way they can display their masculinity is to join a gang. We have failed them too. And if there's a gang presence in your school, bullying victimization becomes very different. It's very sexist. If you have gang presence, then you have sexism, double standards and you have a different form of victimization. Another paper I can send you on that too, beautiful, beautiful. So what do we want? I actually just would like everybody to say when they hear this language, not appropriate. Don't use that language here. If somebody says you throw like a girl, throw a ball at them. I mean, don't hit them hard. Just show that girls can throw. Okay, I don't know what that means, right? So this stuff comes from the Anti-Defamation League has good stuff for you to look at. I will send George all of these links that I'm talking about. Some of them are at the end of the slide, but basing our histories, Anti-Defamation League, GLSEN, Trevor, all of those have great materials. You don't have to create this stuff yourself. And I come from a state in which you could be fired if you actually explained sexual orientation to a student down part of Illinois. So I recognize that. And you could have an administrator that would appreciate it if you would not talk to kids about homosexuality. You're just gonna have to work on your own context there and shame on that principle. So why little success? All of this research, and guess what? Very few of the large can prevention programs in bullying even address any of the stuff I'm talking about. Because if you're trying to promote a bullying prevention program and mass market it to the southern part of this country, to the progressive part of this country, you want it neutral. Well, what has the neutral benign programs gotten us? No reduction in bullying. We're actually talking to kids not about sexism and double standards and wanting to have healthy relationships. We're giving them definitions of bullying and we're showing them the handbook on bullying. We're not necessarily giving them skills to promote healthy, healthy relationships and make better decisions. So one solution is to have a law that requires that Colorado has an enumerated law and it's the best thing that ever happened to Colorado because in Colorado they wouldn't protect their sexual minority youth unless they had to. Right, we can talk more about that. So there's a huge movement to empower the bystanders, empower the bystanders, like some bracelets, we're gonna have some pencils, we're gonna have t-shirts, we're gonna have some of the most popular bullies in the school, create a film. Okay. Well, the literature on willingness to intervene and bystander intervention is complex. It is very, very complex. And I have 15 minutes left, I don't know, probably one million slides to go. So we're gonna give you the, I was just in Israel a couple of weeks ago at this point they were like, hit the high points. I was like, wow, that's really good. Hit the high points. I was like, lady, wrap it up already. I said to their words, I was like, rough crowd. And they were like, no, no, no, no, that's actually well-behaved. So I could do anything right now. So essentially when we think about willingness to intervene, this may be on the slide, what do we know? We know who intervenes, young kids intervene up until about fourth and fifth grade. Remember boys in kindergarten and first grade, they still hug each other, they hug. I pick up my nephew, I'm like, go hug him. Hug him, hug him, hug him, hug him as long as you can. Because eventually society's gonna say that's not good. And he's like, why do we have to talk about it? He's like six, he's like honestly. The young ones intervene, girls intervene, we intervene. We have an ethic of care, that's just how we are. We take care of our aging parents, that's it. Kids intervene if their friends intervene. Kids intervene in schools where staff intervene. Kids are intervening in schools where it's cool to intervene and help the victim. Okay, very, very, very complex. It's not as simple as telling kids to intervene without them necessary, giving them tools. Yet another meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is a summary of bystander interventions. You don't have to look at the slide, I'm gonna break it down, so simple and easy for you here. We went in and found a number of studies, 11 or 12, depending on how you slice it, and where they have bystander intervention programs. So, where they go in and they talk to kids, what are the barriers? Why do you not help the victims in school? And what kind of skills do you need to do that? And shifting the norms. What we find here, and I will refer to the effect sizes here, this is a typical effect size of 0.13, what we get in school-based studies and it's usually not sustainable. So that's usually where we're at. Notice this high school effect size, high school effect size, 0.44, that's pretty high. That's huge, if you know anything about effect sizes. What it means in high school, the bystander intervention programs work pretty darn well. And I remember Polannon here, who was my undergrad, who's now a doctor, Polannon, a statistician. He called me one day and he said, we have some interesting findings. It worked in high school, it didn't work in middle school. I said, Josh, you remember middle school? He was like, oh my God, why are you bringing that up? I was like, no, no, I just want you to remember, I know you're a statistician, but you went to middle school, he was like, yes, it was the most awful three years of my life and I just wanted it to be over and I don't even know why we're talking about it. I was like, okay, that's now, I'm a good therapist, think about the push button technique and say, how was high school? Loved high school, loved it, the best years. What was different in middle school? He said, I don't know, I just wanted to disappear in middle school, I just wanted to make sure I didn't stick out in any way. I said, would you have intervened for victims in middle school? He's like, absolutely not! The kids that were doing it are the most popular, I'm not going against them. And then they might turn on me and I'm like, okay. And in high school, he's like, yeah, we kind of, you know, because you belong to different, I was like kind of a social butterfly, I was like, yeah, he's between different groups. So I didn't have social capital in all one group. And I said, there you go. I said, ah, there's less risk in high school than middle school. Developmental psychology would say that. By high school, you're like, cut it out, dude, what is your problem? Right, you say just like that, right, Jackson? Uh-huh, yeah, absolutely. Jackson's like, no, I still, no, not really. So this is hard to read, but if you look at this 0.46, this is a program that's called Build Respect. It's two months long, it's individual, it's not an entire year. This is huge. Now, what you may not see here is Evers and Perchesca. Perchesca, many of you, how many know that name, Perchesca Norcross? Right, thank you very much, psychologists in the room. Social workers, based on theory of change, right? So smokers pre-contemplate, pre-contemplate, pre-contemplate quitting, right? Drinkers pre-contemplate, pre-contemplate, and then they contemplate, and then they might enact. Kids do the same thing with intervention. When we do focus groups with kids and we say, you know, do you stick up for this chronically victimized kid? Well, I thought about it, and I thought about it again. And then we identify the barriers so that they can eventually help. And so that was the strongest one, theoretically grounded program called Build Respect, and I can send you this publication too, and you can certainly get this intervention. And it was pretty powerful, that's a huge effect size. So when we think about the social movement that is promoting caring and being the upstander than the bystander, we have to recognize that it's developmentally focused in that we have to look at the age of the target group. The gender girls are more likely to kind of go out on a limb, depending on who they hang out with. Peer and adult norms, level of bullying, and peer victimization. If you have a high rate of aggression and bullying in your schools and you think you're gonna put an intervention program in there, you're not a good behaviorist, you cannot have two opposing behaviors happen, right? It's pathological if we're gonna have high rates of bullying and then we're gonna encourage kids to intervene, you'll fail. It's the cart before the horse, we do it all the time. Think about the visual of the cart before the horse, right? The horse is a bystander intervention. The cart's in front of it. Come on, you gotta get the bullying stuff out of the way. Do an assessment, get that to a minimum, create safety for this type of behavior. Or you'll fail. And actually you might make it worse. Etrogenic effects, some of what we're doing we're making things worse, right? We get the kids all worked up and then we get too busy and we don't follow through. And you have this, it's like cleaning your house. In the middle of it's just like a mess, right? You gotta push through it, an analogy. Okay, and so the last 10 minutes or so I'm going to take you through, no, eight minutes actually. I'm gonna take you through kind of where we're at right now. Knowing all that basic research, knowing that the bullying prevention programs that are in place are not mapping on what kids are actually saying to us that's kind of driving some of the bullying and the sexual violence and the escalation of teen dating violence. And we finally just said, what if, with all this research, why don't we talk to kids about skill development, really? Let's go back to social emotional learning. Social emotional learning is an umbrella term that came out of a 1994 conference. You should know that it includes everything that we know about, character education, social skills, life skills, all those things that we went through over the years. And I'm in a state where we've developed the SEL standards, right? So I get to hang out with Roger Weisberg at Castle, which there'll be a link at the end of this too. And so we have required SEL standards. We are required to have 50 minutes of SEL a week in our schools. It's a requirement, it's pretty nice, right? Not that they do that, but that helps. So what do we wanna do though? Now SEL isn't just touchy-feely, then in fact it relates more to just self-awareness and skills but ethics. So I'm gonna fly through some of these and know that I've written quite a bit about this, some nice chapters that explicate this very beautifully that I can send to you. And if you email me and I don't respond within like a couple hours and assume it went to spam and email me again, not gonna hurt my feelings, okay? Remind me, remind me. So we're gonna teach kids to identify and manage one's emotions and behaviors, recognize personal qualities and the supports that they may have around them and demonstrate their own personal and academic goals. We're gonna use the social awareness to then improve in their interpersonal skills. Really learn how to understand empathy, perspective-tasting, diverse perspectives. And then we're also going to think about decision-making skills responsible, personal, ethics types of things. And so SEL, SEL. So we're evaluating, we just finished evaluating a second step. How many of you have heard of second step? A few of you here, yeah. One of the big trials was actually in California. So a second step, we evaluate the middle school program, but it is a K through eight curriculum. The K through five is newer and you should know that it's less bullying prevention, it's more focused on executive function challenges that kids might have. So I encourage you to look at it. It's not my program, it's committee for children's program. We were just trying to find a program that included these things, that included those risk and protective factors we just talked about that might highlight diversity and prejudice associated with sexual orientation and sexual minority youth. The second step program has a narrator that clearly is gender non-conforming. He never says his sexual orientation, but the kids have such a conversation in class of like, do you think he is? And it really depends on how the teachers handle that material. So we're doing a follow-up study to that. There's three of the 15 lessons at sixth grade are associated with bullying. So 12 of the lessons are associated with social emotional learning. Focus on brain research, positive qualities and developmental focus for the middle school kids. So the only reason we're having a conversation about social emotional learning is because this meta-analysis here. The only reason that I've been to Congress and Senate is Congress and Senate will say something like this. Well, there's that Durlach study out there that showed that if kids are safe in school, they learn better. I could talk like that, cause I'm from Virginia. So, I took a long time to get rid of that accent, so it comes up really quickly. And the reality is a Durlach meta-analysis showed that in schools that had social emotional learning, the 213 studies, in the schools where there was SEL, the kids performed 11 percentile higher on test scores. That's the only reason we're talking about SEL and DC. Without this study, we would still be sitting back talking by ourselves, because now the politicians are saying, wait a minute, kids that are safer, that are developing better management skills and emotion regulation skills, they score better. Yes, let's go SEL, right? So in our motto site, this is a three year study. I'm going to summarize a three year study up in about three minutes. We went into 36 schools in Illinois and Kansas. That's going to be important. Please hold on to those two states in your head, Illinois and Kansas. 18 of the schools received second step, 18 received nothing essentially. And kids received a total of 41 lessons, 15 lessons. And what were they, lots of different topics. So 15 lessons in sixth grade, these were the same kids, nested cohort design. By the eighth grade, these kids had had 41 lessons of social-emotional learning. We would hope something would have moved, right? I know you're curious, you're at the edge of your seat. What did you do? We talked about empathy, communication, bullying, emotion management, problem solving. We introduced a lot of the college readiness in grades seven and eight and we did substance abuse prevention, because guess what? Kids that are chronically victimized start using drugs earlier. LGBT and gender non-conforming youth that are being targeted through homophobic epithets cope through alcohol and drug use. And kids that are the ineffective bullies tend to get involved in drug and alcohol use earlier. So what do we find? That's like I said, years and years of analysis, lots of data collection and here we are. What did we find? In the first year we found those kids that are in the second step school, 42% less likely to report physical fighting right out of the gate, 42% reduction. That's a significant public health reduction. In our country for healthy people 2020, they would like to reduce physical fighting on the school by 3%. It's 2014. I don't know if you're gonna wait until 2020 for a 3% reduction. Okay, we got 42% reduction after 15 lessons of talking to kids about empathy, communication skills, anger management, impulse control, substance abuse. We hit them all. Remember risk and protective factors, all of that stuff. Year two interesting, year two. We have 53% of the kids in the second step were less likely to report homophobic victimization, less likely to be targeted those homophobic epithets. That's pretty powerful, right? 36% in year two, less likely to report sexual harassment perpetration. Do you see the print? Read it. In Illinois only. Kansas it got worse. We didn't have any of this effect in Kansas. I don't know why, it's a good question. We do know that implementation was varied quite a bit in Kansas and there was quite a bit of pushback when they got to the sexual harassment content. I received calls from Kansas saying, teachers saying, I'm not teaching this. When the gender non-conforming narrator came in in those lessons, we've now pinpointed those teachers did not show those parts of the lesson. It's Kansas. My name is Dorothy. I can say anything about Kansas because the name has followed me, right? Kansas has an anti-gay bill that was just introduced. We had just finished our trial in a place like Kansas that would have an anti-gay bill that says I don't have to wait on you and give you services if you're gay. So it could be a social political nature. We all recognize you're in California and every time I present they're like, that's you people in the Midwest. So social political matters. It matters, matters, matters. And so don't look to us to do what you need to do. Your context, but talk to your kids and figure out what the hell is going on because even in this progressive state that you're in there's pockets of conservatives. I was sitting next to one of them last night. He likes guns. He's Republican. I was in first class. I was just like, yeah, yeah. He was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, I hunted, yeah. I'm not about, there's a long flight. I'm not gonna argue with you. No. He was drinking heavily too. Hell no, you, no. And he's probably listening to this like, oh my God, she just told on me. I just watched Nebraska. I just went back to my movie. Okay. So we're gonna wrap this up. So essentially all of that, and we have much more research than I don't have time to talk about and certainly I can come back to California in the middle of the winter any time. I was like, yes, George, I'll be right there. We need to give kids life and social skills not just knowledge about bullying. They can recite the definitions actually. They don't even like our definitions. They say they just experienced drama, right? And so we need to give them life skills that's going to prepare them for the workforce so we can retire and feel good about it, right? We need to assess whether the programs that we already have in place, you may have programs that are in place that are reducing some of these phenomenon, but you're not thinking that they're targeting that. Remember, it doesn't have to have bully in the title of the prevention program for it to be effective to promote school climate and positive outcomes. We do have to do something about the gender and the homophobic language. Bottom line, we have to. And we have to adjust sexual harassment and we have to address the peer norms that promote all of this behavior. We also have to recognize I didn't present a lot of this data, but we have some very, very clear longitudinal data that kids that are exposed to family violence in their home, they're prone toward bullying, perpetration, but then subsequent alcohol and drug uptake, all right? So we need to really recognize this. There's not much we can do except that we need to work with the systems outside of the school to prevent some of this. Technology is a moving target. Who knows where we're going to be? I mean, just think where we are in comparison to even five years ago. We're just gonna have to stay on top of it and partner with our parent groups. Collect data on your own. Use data, we say, database decision-making and the reality is you need to know what's happening in your building and know that there are cohort effects. As soon as you think you understand what's happening in your school, there's another cohort that comes in. And one new kid to your school can change the climate too. So you better be careful about those new kids. Especially, I was a military brat, so military connect to get active, just wreak havoc right in the school on the first day. So I had to establish my dominance as the new girl. I did it in an ice pro-social way. Yes, involve your PE teacher. We have about three papers written on bullying and PE. Three. You guys remember PE? Yeah, you remember dodgeball? Uh-huh, it's still happening. It's contraindicated and they're told not to do it, but PE teachers still have dodgeball Fridays. You know you do in your schools too. Have a creative, we're moving increasingly to creating a confidential reporting system for parents. I would love the day when I did not get a call every day from a parent saying, the school's doing absolutely enough, what can I do? I would love to be able to say, let's have a system where we hold the school accountable and they have to follow through with an investigation. I think it's simple. That's simple. That's simple. We track kids' academic abilities down to the point of, they know whether or not my nephew can draw a triangle from the age of four to the age of 10. But they somehow they'll take care of that little bullying victimization. And we just as parents and aunts and uncles sit around and wait for them to settle it? No, you're gonna settle it and I'm gonna hold your foot to the fire and you're going to investigate and you're gonna figure this out, right? Open to our policy as much as possible. Work respectful with the families. What about your adult culture? Increasingly, we are in our next trial. We're doing second step, but 14 of the 28 schools, we're gonna sit down with the teachers and talk to them about the language that they use that marginalizes the youth in their classrooms. Right? So let's start with the adults, too. Social-emotional learning, positive behavior supports for the younger kids certainly sets the tone for many of this. At the end, when George sends you this, it actually is online. I saw it online. I could click on and get my own slides this morning. It was beautiful. These links, please go to them. This is, Campbell Collaboration is the first one. These are meta-analysis on any topic you can put in any topic. Bullying, homework with parents, home visits. The National Registry, how many know the National Registry? Not enough of you. Not enough of you. The National Registry of Efficacious Programs, Evidence-Based Programs, their Cleaning House here. This is where you can go in and put in a keyword and it will pull up those efficacious programs. I encourage, if we were taking a class from me, you would go in and I would say, okay, what kind of programs you have running in your schools now? We would go to the National Registry and many of you would find that zero of the programs that you're using on that National Registry. And then some of you would say, yes, it's on there, other types of programs. Okay, so the CASEL website is the Consortium of Social-Emotional Learning. I'm coming, George. Evidence-Based School Climate, Character Education, Cartoon Network, Sesame Street. If you have younger kids, Big Bird. I have Big Bird talk to my nieces and nephews all the time. They're like, Big Bird's being bullied. Yeah, Big Bird's being bullied. And how's Big Bird gonna take care of it? Love Sesame Street. Stories of us, Facebook, Shifting Boundaries, which is a middle school program, the WITS program, which is Canadian, great stuff, positive behavior supports. GLSEN, let's get reels at the top. You guys get to watch that today. We get to watch it together. So excited. Movie, movie day. And Trevor Project. There we go. Thank you very much.