NCJ Number
248253
Date Published
2014
Length
260 pages
Annotation
This book examines news media construction of school bullying as a social problem.
Abstract
One chapter explores early portrayals of school bullying as an issue of individual behavior based in individual pathology. This was accompanied by a model that viewed bullying victims, bullies, and victim-bullies as deviant children and youth. Two chapters trace the subsequent shift away from the emphasis on individual deviancy to sociocultural explanations of school bullying. Under this view, bullying is portrayed as a broad public health epidemic fueled by familial, institutional, and cultural failures in the socialization of children and youth. Another two chapters develop the perspective of school bullying as a social problem by viewing it as an arena for the ongoing discourse of gender, sexuality, and social control. Two case studies are presented to show how gender, sexuality, and social control have become the framework for news media coverage of bullying. The news media's role in constructing school bullying as social problems is discussed in another chapter through an analysis of the anti-bullying movement as viewed by the media. The concluding chapter describes how the news media's attention to individuals' involvement in school bullying has led to the imposition of counterproductive forms of social control on students, such as zero-tolerance policies and criminalization. The authors favor a more complex framework for countering bullying under a social-ecological approach that includes the involvement of students in the development of an anti-bullying community of informal social control. Approximately 200 references