Session: Bullying in Adolescence: What Families, Policy-Makers, and Prevention Scientists Need to Know (Society for Prevention Research 27th Annual Meeting)

Effective school-based bullying prevention programs have been developed and disseminated on a large-scale to begin to address the links between bullying and a myriad of negative effects on the health and well-being of youth. Yet even with decreases in general bullying, disparities continue to persist particularly related to bias-based bullying, or bullying rooted in stigma (Gower et al., 2018). Families need more information about how they can protect their kids and prevent them from bullying. School professionals, administrators, and other policy-makers need more information on bias-based bullying and links to outcomes for minority youth. Prevention scientists need more information about avenues for intervention development and potential impacts on intervention effectiveness when bullying occurs within the context of prevention program delivery.

This symposium brings together three studies of bullying that take an ecological approach by focusing on bullying in the context of family (paper 1), school prevention (paper 2), and mental health (paper 3). The first paper is an epidemiological evaluation of associations across the adolescent decade between bullying and parental monitoring, highlighting the important role that monitoring, or lack thereof, could play in the perpetuation of bullying. The second paper looks at bullying victimization and bias-based bullying that occurs during the course of a pregnancy prevention program among middle school age youth from a rural community. This paper speaks directly to the insidious role that bias-based bullying can play in contributing to negative outcomes by reducing the effectiveness of empirically-based prevention programs. The third paper takes a more in-depth look at bias-based bullying among LGBQ youth by evaluating seven different forms of bias-based bullying for patterns of victimization and links to academic and mental health outcomes. An internationally renowned leader in the field of bullying prevention will serve as the discussant for this symposium.

Implication for families, policy-makers, and prevention scientists will be discussed along with recommendations for next steps in reducing the negative impact that bullying can have on youth, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalized.