Student bullying is epidemic worldwide, involving nearly one-third of students from Kindergarten through High School. It causes its targets physical and emotional distress, marginalizes diverse youth and is associated with student suicide and school shootings. Bullying is one of the biggest social issues facing young people and yet most schools have no effective strategies to stop it.

No Bully developed Solution Team as a radically effective response to bullying that is grounded in evolving research from the fields of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. These findings reveal that the vast majority of students are capable of empathy and kindness when their school creates the conditions that support these behaviors. Under Solution Team, a trained educator brings together a team of students and leverages their empathy to end the bullying of one of their peers. The educator tells the team that they are not in trouble, describes how it feels to be in the target’s shoes and asks the team what they can do or stop doing to resolve this situation. The team includes the bully, the bully-followers and positive leaders from the peer group. The educator leads the team through two structured follow-up meetings, the final one attended by the target.

Two independent studies reported that Solution Teams solve student bullying in at least 80% of cases and that these cases remained solved at a three-month follow up. In other words, we have found the solution to bullying.

Problem

Student bullying is epidemic across industrialized nations worldwide, involving approximately 30% of students. It causes its targets physical, cognitive and emotional distress, marginalizes diverse youth and leads its targets to commit suicide and school shootings. Unless schools intervene promptly and effectively, the result is student disengagement and long-term mental health challenges, which impact school performance and impede students from ever reaching their lifetime potential. Students who habitually bully tend to engage in delinquency, alcohol abuse, anti-social behaviours and crimes in to their adult lives. Unchecked, bullying creates unsafe school environments and leads to greater violence in our communities.

Solution

No Bully has developed a non-punitive response to bullying grounded in the new research on empathy that the vast majority of students, including those involved in bullying, demonstrate empathy and kindness towards their peers when their school creates conditions that support these behaviours. We train educators how to bring together a Solution Team® of students and leverage their empathy to end the bullying of one of their peers. The educator tells the team that they are not in trouble, describes how it feels to be in the target’s shoes and asks the team what they can do to resolve this situation. Evolutionary biology has shown that human survival as a species depended on our innate capacity to operate in groups and to take care of each other. The discovery of mirror neurons at the University of Parma, Italy in the 1990s exposed the neural underpinnings for why we feel distressed that another being is in pain. When students come together as a Solution Team and discover that a peer is suffering because of bullying, and when they are told that they are not in trouble, the vast majority is sufficiently moved to bring the bullying to an end. Solution Team creates the conditions in which peers who were formerly bystanders become allies, and ensures that the student who was bullied is given acceptance. Our goal is to bring funders together with schools who are motivated to become bully-free so that we can provide training in Solution Team at low or zero cost.

Example

No Bully recently delivered a one-day training for key staff at all the schools in a large, mixed ethnicity urban school district how to run solution teams. No Bully received this report of what happened next. "We recently completed a solution team at our high school and it was a huge success! We brought together a solution team for a young man who was struggling with his sexuality, which in turn caused him to be targeted with gay slurs by fellow classmates. When the students heard what the situation was, we were surprised to see such remorse by the bullies, as well as those who had nothing to do with the situation. The bullies openly expressed remorse, as well as offered solutions to their behavior, sometimes almost in tears. I honestly have to say that there was true sense of compassion in the room for their fellow student. That moment proved to set the stage for an easy transition into changing the way that students were treating the target. The most rewarding part was that this solution team didn’t so much focus on sexual preference, as much as they did the human being, and that is the tone we set from the outset. When the process was complete, the students expressed their genuine pride in their school for offering these types of innovative programs, as well as expressed their willingness to participate in future solution teams."

Marketplace

The number of schools in the US alone is huge. In fall 2011, the United States had over 50 million students attending approximately 99,000 public elementary and secondary schools falling under the jurisdiction of 13,600 public school districts Many schools are turning to for-profit and non-profit organizations to help them create bully-free campuses. A Google search for anti-bullying program reveals thousands of disparate initiatives. Programs range from whole school initiatives that seek to shift school culture to inspirational student assemblies. The former programs are expensive and time-consuming and at their best create on average about a 20% reduction in bullying. Student assemblies on the other hand tend to be emotionally stirring but leave no lasting change. There are at best only a handful of programs that help schools comply with their legal mandate to implement an anti-bullying policy and bullying response system. No Bully differentiates itself in working with schools to implement a non-punitive system for stopping bullying that the school can sustain long-term without dependency on No Bully