Sticks and stones : defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering the power of character and empathy

Title:

Author:

Bazelon, Emily.

ISBN:

9780812992809

Personal Author:

Bazelon, Emily.

Edition:

First edition.

Publication Information:

New York : Random House, [2013]

Physical Description:

viii, 386 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Contents:

Trouble -- Escalation -- Solutions -- What next? -- Frequently asked questions about bullying.

Abstract:

Bazelon defines what bullying is and, just as important, what it is not; explores when intervention is essential and when kids should be given the freedom to fend for themselves; dispels persistent myths about bullying; and takes her readers into schools that have succeeded in reducing bullying and examines their successful strategies.

Subject Term:

Bullying.

Bullying -- Prevention.

Bullying in schools.

Bullying in schools -- Prevention.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2088962

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

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Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Being a teenager has never been easy, but in recent years, with the rise of the Internet and social media, it has become exponentially more challenging. Bullying, once thought of as the province of queen bees and goons, has taken on new, complex, and insidious forms, as parents and educators know all too well.

No writer is better poised to explore this territory than Emily Bazelon, who has established herself as a leading voice on the social and legal aspects of teenage drama. In Sticks and Stones, she brings readers on a deeply researched, clear-eyed journey into the ever-shifting landscape of teenage meanness and its sometimes devastating consequences. The result is an indispensable book that takes us from school cafeterias to courtrooms to the offices of Facebook, the website where so much teenage life, good and bad, now unfolds.

Along the way, Bazelon defines what bullying is and, just as important, what it is not . She explores when intervention is essential and when kids should be given the freedom to fend for themselves. She also dispels persistent myths: that girls bully more than boys, that online and in-person bullying are entirely distinct, that bullying is a common cause of suicide, and that harsh criminal penalties are an effective deterrent. Above all, she believes that to deal with the problem, we must first understand it.

Blending keen journalistic and narrative skills, Bazelon explores different facets of bullying through the stories of three young people who found themselves caught in the thick of it. Thirteen-year-old Monique endured months of harassment and exclusion before her mother finally pulled her out of school. Jacob was threatened and physically attacked over his sexuality in eighth grade--and then sued to protect himself and change the culture of his school. Flannery was one of six teens who faced criminal charges after a fellow student's suicide was blamed on bullying and made international headlines. With grace and authority, Bazelon chronicles how these kids' predicaments escalated, to no one's benefit, into community-wide wars. Cutting through the noise, misinformation, and sensationalism, she takes us into schools that have succeeded in reducing bullying and examines their successful strategies. The result is a groundbreaking book that will help parents, educators, and teens themselves better understand what kids are going through today and what can be done to help them through it.

Praise for Sticks and Stones

"Intelligent, rigorous . . . [Emily Bazelon] is a compassionate champion for justice in the domain of childhood's essential unfairness." --Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review

"[Bazelon] does not stint on the psychological literature, but the result never feels dense with studies; it's immersive storytelling with a sturdy base of science underneath, and draws its authority and power from both." -- New York

"A humane and closely reported exploration of the way that hurtful power relationships play out in the contemporary public-school setting . . . As a parent herself, [Bazelon] brings clear, kind analysis to complex and upsetting circumstances." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Bullying isn't new. But our attempts to respond to it are, as Bazelon explains in her richly detailed, thought-provoking book. . . . Comprehensive in her reporting and balanced in her conclusions, Bazelon extracts from these stories useful lessons for young people, parents and principals alike." --The Washington Post

Author Notes

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and the Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School. Before joining Slate, she worked as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, and lives in New Haven with her husband and two sons. This is her first book.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Providing a nuanced understanding of bullying, Bazelon explores the lives of three young adults deeply affected by this enduring and important social issue. The author considers meaningful ways of addressing and reducing the negative impact of bullying, and though she does not provide easy answers, she does help provide a better understanding of a complex problem. Narrator Rebecca Lowman captures the spirit of the author's text throughout this audio production. Lowman provides matter-of-fact delivery, excellent pacing, and smooth transitions. She avoids melodrama, particularly in passages describing episodes of bullying, and provides distinct voices for the people-both young and old, male and female-quoted in the text. A Random House hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Bullying has become a buzzword recently with high-profile examples of its tragic ramifications appearing frequently on the national media. Bazelon first became involved in reporting on bullying for a series in Slate magazine, which ultimately led to this book-length analysis of the phenomenon. The book is framed by the author's examination of three different bullying situations. These cases lead to a deeper discussion of the factors that foment bullying and how bullying affects its victims. Bazelon also examines the motivation for bullying and how adults, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators can address the problem, whether it's traditional face-to-face bullying or cyberbullying. She also deconstructs the language of bullying, which teens often refer to as drama, and looks at how a teen's social capital can affect his or her likeliness to be bullied. This very perceptive and accessible work on a topic of increasing relevance is a must-read for any teacher, administrator, or after-school provider for teens and tweens.--Gaus, Eve Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

The question of whether humans are becoming more brutal or more civilized has been debated urgently by the Athenians, the philosophers of the Renaissance, the Victorians and the existentialists. Those who argue that cruelty is currently becoming more acute point to the Rwandan genocide, global warming, and the malicious acts of selfish corporations and corrupt politicians. Contrariwise, others point to a safer and kinder society of greater prosperity and less prejudice against social, religious and ethnic minorities; Steven Pinker's 2011 book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," proposes that we live more peaceably now than ever before. The dichotomous argument has particular resonance in the context of childhood. Teachers no longer routinely hit students; laws require accommodations for young people with learning disabilities; parents keep watch for teachers' abuse and vice versa; developmental therapists are around every corner. Yet the Internet has unleashed meanness of a previously unimagined scope and celerity; broken households escalate children's proclivity to launch unmonitored assaults on weaker kids; ethics are preached neither at home nor at school; and the accessibility of assault rifles enables nearly apocalyptic juvenile excess. Adult bullies from talk radio to Congress get constant airtime, and in many quarters their belligerence is applauded. Still, we are shocked when children behave belligerently toward one another. Youthful aggression has always been a problem and always will be; the pitilessness of childhood, like that of the world, is most likely a constant quantity. Emily Bazelon's intelligent, rigorous "Sticks and Stones" charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts, who was bullied atrociously and committed suicide. Bazelon includes chapters on anti-bullying measures with good track records. She reviews jurisprudence on bullying, and examines both the virtues and the pitfalls of treating it as a crime. She tries to delineate what parents can achieve, what schools can achieve, and what may come of the shifting power differential among parents and schools and social agencies. Bazelon is at her best as a storyteller, and the most interesting parts of the book are its human narratives. She resists the idea that there is always an innocent victim; among her three subjects, she paints Monique as essentially blameless, but the others as having some hand in their own suffering. Her writing about Phoebe Prince for Slate, which inspired and is expanded in this book, is especially trenchant; it rejects the simple "bullied to death" narrative that dominated the media at the time. Bazelon indicates that Phoebe's situation was complicated: she had been cutting herself, had had problems in a previous school, had made a prior suicide attempt and had gone off her antidepressants six weeks before she took her life. Given Phoebe's history, Bazelon writes that she couldn't understand the prosecutor's decision "to lay the burden of her suicide at the feet of six adolescents." If charity begins at home, then so, too, does brutality: at home and early, and Bazelon looks for the seeds of troubling behavior in the home lives of bullies. She is taken with the work of Dan Olweus, the grand old man of anti-bullying theory and practice, whose programs target the school, the classroom and the individual. She describes a headmaster who was able to transform the climate at his school largely through charisma, will and the methodology proposed by George Sugai, who believes that positive rewards given to students for positive social skills may be just as effective as punishment for those who are out of line. Investigating the role of the Internet in modern bullying, Bazelon visited the offices of Facebook, achieving an unusual degree of access. She describes both the company's woefully inadequate anti-bullying protocols for young subscribers - Facebook's current business model seems built on "habituating kids to giving up their privacy" - and their ill-advised efforts to bully her once they got a whiff of her criticisms. Bazelon explores the role of adults in the lives of kids who are bullied, and shows that often, parents and teachers who set out to help end up exacerbating the problem. She refuses the notion that the real reason for bullying is violent video games, rock music, parental neglect, social media or any other single cause. She thinks with nuance, making it clear that the problem is overdetermined and requires complex, subtle solutions. Sometimes, that makes the book feel confused. "Sticks and Stones" lacks a central thesis; it describes a problem, reports on many proposed solutions and leaves it to readers to draw their own conclusions. As someone who was bullied as a child, I found myself wishing to avoid these familiar narratives, which stirred up nostalgic fear; as the father of young children, I devoured them with anticipatory terror. Yet even though I came away from this book far better informed, I was left with no particular sense of what to do. Bazelon often provides excessive detail about process: details of how she arrived at conclusions that are not particularly startling. There is little meta-thinking; the analysis has an atomized quality. In "The Bully Society," published a year ago, Jessie Klein argues persuasively that the preponderance of bullying stems from the escalating social imperative for boys and girls to conform to oppressive masculine stereotypes. Bazelon accurately avers that such generalizations are reductive. "We have to be smart and careful about the Web," she concludes. "The Internet won't do it for us. The best thing we can do is help kids learn to look out for themselves." But sometimes reductive answers can be arresting, and one longs for Bazelon to proclaim a bit more, not always to let common sense trump revelation. Her most winning achievement is the kindness she demonstrates throughout the book. She is nonjudgmental in a generous rather than simply neutral way, and she culls as much pathos from the circumstances of bullies as from those of their victims. She identifies not only the sadism of abusive children, but also their sadness. She is a compassionate champion for justice in the domain of childhood's essential unfairness. In several touching instances, she recounts her retreat from journalistic neutrality. On a subway in Washington, she sees some teenagers berating an older man, and forces herself to intervene after she thinks: "Wait, I'm writing a book about bullying! Bystanders are supposed to speak up!" The intervention leads to her being attacked verbally, and generates feelings of intense embarrassment; she ends up wondering whether she should have just stayed out of it. Then she suddenly figures out why so many students keep their distance when they witness bullying. In another passage, she describes exploiting her personal connections to help Monique escape her bullies by switching schools - "figuring that there's nothing fair about who knows whom in life." It's not standard operating procedure, but it reflects an essential humanity that is more important in this book than pure objectivity would be. Adult bullies from talk radio to Congress get constant air time, yet we are shocked when children act that way. Andrew Solomon is the author, most recently, of "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity."

Choice Review

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." Bazelon (senior editor, Slate; Truman Capote Fellow, Yale Law School) challenges this centuries-old adage to ignore the pain of a "mere taunt." She skillfully constructs a stage on which the reader experiences the carnage perpetrated by peer abuse on the lives of three young victims. The cast of characters is fictitious but the devastation caused by their tormenters feels authentic. The "storyteller" captures the attention of the audience with chilling narratives that breathe life into the study of bullying. In addition, the book addresses the wounds that may be inflicted by the potentially damaging weapon of social media in the cultural milieu today. The compelling accounts of these haunted voices are thoroughly punctuated with salient empirical research findings. This cleverly crafted blending of drama and informed data fuels the discussion about the power of empathy to combat the culture of bullying and elevates the author as an authoritative voice in the national conversation about prevention. A teacher's guide is available (online or in print) through the publisher. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. S. Durr Middle Georgia State College

Kirkus Review

A nuanced approach to the epidemic of bullying in American schools. In 2009, Slate senior editor Bazelon began writing articles about cyberbullying. She shared in the growing concern about how social media can amplify the effects of bullying. After writing the first few articles, her focus shifted. While cyberbullying is "changing the nature of teenage bullying," it is still "a new incarnation of an old phenomenon." Probing further, the author realized that bullying is more complex than she originally thought. She explores the part normally played by aggression (when teens jockey for social position) and contrasts this to occasions when a disparity in power exists (and could signify bullying). Failure by both parents and schools to intervene in order to protect victims on the one hand, and overreaction on the other, can lead to bullying. In extreme situations, complex legal issues involving the responsibility of school authorities may arise (including potential criminal charges when violence occurs). Bazelon also considers the way that the prejudices of school personnel or the broader community against people who defy conventional gender roles can tacitly encourage victimization. The author uses three major case studies to exemplify issues. The first illustrates how overreaction by a mother when her daughter was mocked led to an escalating situation. In the second, school authorities tacitly countenanced the abuse of gay teens, who successfully sued for violation of their constitutional rights. Lastly, a tragic suicide involved a girl whose detractors were charged with murder, even though they had no direct involvement in her death. In the concluding section, Bazelon surveys promising new approaches to dealing with bullying, and the appendix includes fact sheets and a resource guide. A convincing case against media hype and a premature rush to judgment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Excerpts

Chapter 1 Monique Monique McClain wanted a new hairstyle for the first week of seventh grade. She got the idea from her mother, Alycia, who had her long dark hair done up in a sweep over the summer, so that it lay braided smooth on one side of her head and fell in a cascade of curls down the other. Monique, who was thirteen, had her mother's long dark hair and wanted the sweep for her first week at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown, Connecticut. She thought it would look grown-up. A friend of Alycia's who does hair came over and went to work on Monique. When she was finished and Monique's hair was sleek and shiny, her mother snapped a photo of her daughter in profile, a stud earring in the shape of an M gleaming below the braids and a shy half smile on her face. She looked like a more glamorous version of her old jeans-and-ponytail self. Monique didn't usually like to strut, but that morning she let her curls swing on the way to the bus stop. "I was excited to go to school," she said. "I liked how my hair looked. It felt special." But Monique's head was down when Alycia looked out of her fourth-floor apartment window that afternoon and saw her daughter walking home from the bus stop. Alycia called from the window to ask if the hairstyle had been a hit, and Monique said nothing, just shook her head. At the door she followed her mother's rules by stopping to take off her sneakers, then came inside to tell what had happened: two eighth-grade girls on her bus, Destiny and Cheyenne, had mocked her for being a "biter"--a copycat. It turned out that Destiny's cousin had gotten the same hairstyle the week before. Monique hadn't known that. Still, in Destiny's and Cheyenne's eyes, she was a biter, and biters were fair game. The older girls, who were known for being tough, kept at it the next day. They trailed Monique when she got off the bus, walking a few steps behind her and taunting her all the way down the street and onto the grounds of her apartment complex. Monique didn't know why they cared so much about a hairstyle. She just wanted it to stop. She went to her room and called her friend Sonia. "The eighth graders are in my face on the bus and I can't take it," she said. Sonia didn't ride Monique's bus; none of her friends did. She had no one to sit with, no one who could be a buffer against Destiny and Cheyenne. Listening, Alycia felt bad for Monique, but she figured it would blow over. It was just girls being rude; it was just a hairstyle. They'd forget the whole thing by morning. Wouldn't they? But the next afternoon, Monique's head was hanging again: Destiny and Cheyenne had taunted her for being a biter on the way to school and on the way home. Alycia walked Monique to the bus stop in the morning, stayed to make sure Destiny and Cheyenne didn't bother her, and at noon headed to Woodrow Wilson to report that her daughter was being bullied. Alycia met with a Middletown police detective who was stationed at the middle school. He called in Monique and assistant principal Diane Niles. Niles told Monique that if the girls made fun of her again on the way home, the school would take action. Principal Charles Marqua came in for a few minutes and also assured Alycia the school would not stand for this kind of behavior. "They said they would handle it," she told me later. "That they would not tolerate those girls going after Monique like that." And so when Alycia met Monique at the bus stop later that afternoon, she expected to hear that the ride had gone smoothly. But Monique was blank-faced and silent. When the other kids streamed away down the street, she mumbled to her mother in a low voice that the eighth graders were now calling her a snitch as well as a biter. No one--not one kid--was sticking up for her. Alycia called the police on her cell phone to make a harassment complaint. She also called Niles, handing the phone to Monique right there on the sidewalk so she could describe how the bus ride had been worse, not better, than the day before. Niles listened sympathetically and said she would call Destiny's and Cheyenne's parents. But later she called Alycia back to say she hadn't reached the girls' parents, which meant she couldn't tell them to stay off the bus. Niles suggested that Alycia drive Monique to school the next day. Alycia, who is a home health aide trained to care for disabled patients, was working the night shift. She asked her mother, Alexa, to drive Monique in the morning. But this didn't strike Alycia as a viable long-term solution, since Alexa lived a few miles away and Alycia usually borrowed her car to get to work. And why should Monique be the one forced off the bus? Niles told Destiny and Cheyenne to sit away from Monique on the way home that day and from then on. Over the next several days, the girls didn't do as they were told. Some afternoons they got off at the same stop as Monique and followed her home, yelling insults along the way. Smoking cigarettes at the bus stop, they blew smoke in Monique's face. During the last week in September, principal Charles Marqua boarded the bus in the afternoon before it left school and admonished Destiny and Cheyenne to sit in the back, away from Monique. Marqua was new to the school. He hadn't had time to establish his authority, and Destiny and Cheyenne decided to test it. Telling Marqua that only her mother could tell her where to sit, Cheyenne turned her back on him and walked down the aisle. Marqua told her to behave and got off the bus. As soon as it left Woodrow Wilson and rounded the corner, the girls moved to seats right behind Monique, cursing her for snitching, and then shadowed her on the walk home from the bus stop. "We don't totally control the bus," Marqua would tell me later. "We can only do so much." Monique didn't know what to do or where to turn. Over the weekend, she did her best to shake off the dread she felt about riding the bus. She saw her friend Sonia and a couple of other girls, and tried to make sure that the bullying didn't infect the rest of her life. "My friends weren't jumping into it," she said, talking about the trouble she was having with Destiny and Cheyenne. "I always had a lot of different friends at school. I never had a problem like this before." In fact, Monique had thrived in school, doing well in math and reading and in fifth grade even winning an academic achievement award. Signed by President Obama, it hung on a wall in her grandmother's apartment next to the invitation Alexa, a devoted Obama supporter, had gotten to the president's inauguration. Alycia and Alexa went back to Woodrow Wilson repeatedly in September to press Niles about why Destiny and Cheyenne had been allowed to keep riding the bus and to keep sitting near Monique. Alycia suggested that the girls be suspended from the bus for a month. Niles finally said she would tell them to stay off the bus. But when they didn't listen to her and went to the bus stop anyway, it turned out that for liability reasons, the bus drivers had orders to let on any kids waiting at the bus stop. Destiny and Cheyenne kept riding and sitting where they pleased. At last, at the end of September, the girls got a one-day in-school suspension, which they were supposed to spend in a supervised study hall, isolated from the other students. But in the afternoon, Destiny saw Monique walking by on her way to science class, and from the doorway, hissed, "You think ISS"--in-school suspension--"is gonna stop me?" Back on the bus, Destiny and Cheyenne tried to provoke a showdown. Instead of sitting apart from Monique as they'd again been told to do, they stood in the aisle, berating her, as a bunch of eighth-grade boys started calling, "Fight, fight, fight!" Monique kept her face turned toward the window, putting every bit of will she had into stopping herself from crying. When the bus driver told them to sit down, Destiny and Cheyenne moved to the back and threw pens and food at Monique, persuading a few other kids to join in. All of this behavior broke the rules for riding the bus. At the time, though, Connecticut didn't officially require schools to address bullying on the bus or at a bus stop (the law changed the following year). The administrators at Woodrow Wilson tried to help Monique, but their half measures were no match for Destiny and Cheyenne's determined meanness. At the end of September, assistant principal Niles returned the bullying complaint form that Alycia had filed weeks earlier, checking off the box saying she'd investigated the case and found that Monique was in fact the target of threats and intimidation. She recommended a mediation meeting between Monique, Destiny, and Cheyenne. Niles meant well, but sitting all three girls down together was likely to backfire. Mediation works well when kids of equal status are having a two-way conflict, not as an antidote to bullying. Putting a victim and her bullies in a room together and asking them to make up doesn't recognize the power differential between them. Kids who bully are good at manipulating this kind of setting: they often say what adults want to hear in the moment, then retaliate later. One review of anti-bullying programs found that programs that urged peer mediation were associated with more victimization, not less. And if intervention isn't skillful, bullies can use it to their own destructive ends. No one had to tell Alycia this. "I said absolutely not," she told me. "It was common sense. You don't stick a child who's been bullied in a room with all these girls and expect any real change. There'll be all this fronting and pretending and then they'd walk out and say she's a snitch again." The day after Niles finished her investigation, Cheyenne blew smoke in Monique's face at the bus stop again. After a full month of bullying, Alycia was worried about her daughter. Monique was turning inward, losing weight, and sleeping for long stretches--signs, her mother and grandmother feared, that she was depressed. When I met Monique that spring, it was hard for her to talk about the previous fall. Monique had a composed steadiness and could flash a high-wattage smile when she was pleased, but she shut down when I asked her to tell me about her experience at Woodrow Wilson. Her eyes dulled and her voice flattened. She said she didn't remember much. She avoided saying Destiny's and Cheyenne's names. "Yeah, I was crying a lot," she said, staring at the floor of her living room. "Not in front of anyone, but coming home, talking to my mom, thinking about it. At school I didn't go to the second floor where the eighth-grade classes are. I tried to stay away from them, but it didn't work." At that point, Alycia and Alexa took over telling the story, and Monique got up, went to her bedroom, and closed the door. Thinking that an activity outside school might help, Alycia signed up Monique for a local boxing program. Monique liked it at first, but then she started to feel excluded because one of the girls on the team was turning the others against her. That girl was Brianna, the cousin of Destiny whose hairstyle Monique been accused of imitating at the beginning of all the heartache. On one bad afternoon, Monique was drinking water when Alycia came to pick her up. A younger girl on the team whom Monique knew well playfully tapped the bottom of the cup Monique was holding, spilling water on her chin. Monique asked the girl to stop. She did it again. Monique threw the cup down and screamed, "Leave me alone!" She ran out of the gym, and by the time Alycia caught up with her, Monique was doubled over by their locked car, sobbing. "Why does everyone keep messing with me?" she asked, over and over. "I just want everyone to leave me alone!" Alycia had never seen Monique break down like that. She realized how much her daughter was holding inside, behind her blank expression and affectless speech. The next day she took Monique to see a therapist. Alarmed, Alycia now tried everything else she could think of to stop the bullying at school. She called the mother of Monique's friend Sonia to ask if Sonia would be willing to ride the bus with Monique and sit next to her. That helped for a day or two, but then Destiny and Cheyenne complained to the bus driver that Sonia didn't belong on this bus, snapping a picture of her so they could prove Sonia had to go back to her own bus. Alycia tried calling the police the next day to report Destiny and Cheyenne for harassing Monique on the way home. An officer came to the house and took down the complaint but said there was nothing he could do: the girls hadn't broken any laws. Alycia didn't know Destiny's and Cheyenne's parents, but she had a friend who knew Cheyenne's mother, and he offered to broker a meeting. "He said, 'We're going to solve this,' " Alycia remembered. She drove to Cheyenne's house, and her mother came over to the car. But she quickly got defensive, said her daughter had done nothing wrong, and threatened to have Monique suspended from the bus. Sick with frustration, Alycia turned away. Monique would be waiting for her at home, hoping for relief, and she had none to offer. Why do strong kids like Destiny and Cheyenne go after weaker kids like Monique? I started asking myself this question soon after I met Monique. It also happens to be the starting point for the first research ever done on bullying, more than forty years ago. A Swedish graduate student named Dan Olweus had just finished his PhD in psychology in 1969 when he decided to study aggression and victimization among boys. At the time, few adults considered meanness among kids to be a subject worthy of academic attention, but Olweus shuttled from school to school in Stockholm and the town of Solna, asking one thousand sixth- and eighth-grade boys to tell him which of their peers started fights or teased other kids, and which kids were targets. Uncertain about the reliability of the boys' answers, he checked their responses against the impressions of their mothers and teachers. He then asked what aggressors and targets looked like: How did they talk and behave? Were they physically strong or weak? He gave the boys Rorschach-like psychological tests, and went into their homes to gather information about social status and child-rearing practices. How much education and money did the boys' parents have? How strictly did they discipline their children? Finally, Olweus collected data on the school setting and climate. Did the size of a school or a class matter? Did students' attitudes toward their teachers and their schoolwork? Excerpted from Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.