Bullying Prevention: Parents Make the Difference

How the movie "Bully" started a movement to end bullying, and why we as parents need to act on its message.

Even before award-winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch’s Bully hit theaters last April, it had caused quite a stir. More than 20 members of Congress and celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres and Demi Lovato took to social media and the airwaves to try to convince the Motion Picture Association of America to change the documentary’s rating from “R” to “PG-13” after Katy Butler, a 17-year-old girl who had been severely bullied in middle school, took up the cause.

Butler’s petition on Change.org garnered more than 500,000 digital signatures and ultimately won the battle: The MPAA lowered the rating—enabling the film to be screened in schools—and left in a vital scene in which a boy is verbally threatened in a graphic manner on a school bus. Search for nearby screenings of the film at thebullyproject.com. The DVD release is tentatively set for February.

Not Just a Special Needs Issue

Thirteen million children will be bullied in our nation this year, and they come from every walk of life, male and female. It is a fact, though, that children who have special needs are prime targets.

“For students with learning disabilities and other disabilities, bullying is a pandemic,” says James Wendorf, executive director of the National Center for Learning Disabilities. “It occurs every day, with 60 percent of students with special needs being bullied as compared with 25 percent of all students”—and, he notes, some studies put this percentage even higher.

One reason the numbers are likely higher: Most research is based on parent reporting, such as a recent survey conducted by the Interactive Autism Network (whose findings mirror the above statistics, with 63 percent of children on the autism spectrum having been bullied in the past year).

“Just like other children, children with ASD may not tell adults when they are bullied,” says Connie Anderson, Ph.D., community scientific liaison for IAN. In the case of those who are intellectually disabled and/or nonverbal, they may not be able to do so,” Dr. Anderson notes.

According to the IAN Bullying and School Experiences of Children with ASD Survey, typical behaviors that make children on the spectrum targets for bullying include clumsiness, poor hygiene, a stubborn adherence to rules, and misreading social cues (like going on and on about a topic the listener clearly shows no interest in—what Dr. Anderson refers to as “an almost classic autistic behavior”).