New research from the Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education on 37 school shootings, including Columbine, found that almost three-quarters of student shooters felt bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others. In fact, several shooters reported experiencing long-term and severe bullying and harassment from their peers.

Researchers have found that bullying is a very common experience for kids in school and more widespread than previously thought.

Some of the findings form the report on school shootings were surprising:

    • Attackers were rarely impulsive; they planned their actions.

    • In more than 80 percent of the cases, at least one person knew the attacker was planning       something; two or more people knew in almost 60 percent of the cases.

    • School shooters don't fit an accurate "profile." The attackers studied were all boys, but they       varied in age, race, family situations, academic achievement, popularity and disciplinary       history.

    • Most attackers did not threaten their targets beforehand.

    • Before the shootings, most attackers exhibited behaviors that caused others concern, such       as trying to obtain a gun or writing troubling poems and essays.

Bullying experts say that, while it's important to understand the connection between bullying and school shootings, more studies are needed on the full range of bullying behavior and on the socio-ecological conditions that allow it to flourish in some schools. Only studying "the extreme end is neglecting the fact that there's a peer group supporting [bullying] behavior and that we have kids playing various roles," says Dorothy Espelage, Ph.D. who teaches psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

New and innovative research

A nationally representative study of 15,686 students in grades six through 10, published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 285, No. 16) is among the most recent to document the scope of bullying in U.S. schools.

In the study, psychologist Tonja R. Nansel, PhD, and colleagues found that 17 percent of students reported having been bullied "sometimes" or more frequently during the school term. About 19 percent reported bullying others "sometimes" or more often. And six percent reported both bullying and having been bullied.

Nansel and colleagues also found that:

    • Bullying occurs most frequently from sixth to eighth grade, with little variation between       urban, suburban, town and rural areas.

    • Males are more likely to be bullies and victims of bullying than females. Males are more       likely to be  physically bullied, while females are more likely to be verbally or psychologically       bullied.

    • Bullies and victims of bullying have difficulty adjusting to their environments, both socially       and psychologically. Victims of bullying have greater difficulty making friends and are       lonelier.

    • Bullies are more likely to smoke and drink alcohol, and to be poorer students.

    • Bully-victims--students who are both bullies and recipients of bullying--tend to experience       social  isolation, to do poorly in school and to engage in problem behaviors such as smoking       and drinking.

Susan M. Swearer, PhD, lead investigator for the Nebraska Bullying Prevention and Intervention Project, is among the researchers taking a closer look at bully-victims. "In the past, bullying behavior was dichotomized--students were classified as either bullies or victims," she says. "But, kids [often] report that they're both."

In one of Swearer's studies, bully-victims experience higher levels of depression and anxiety than the bully-only group or the victim-only group. "The bully-victim subgroup is really more impaired in terms of internalizing problems," says the University of Nebraska-Lincoln school psychology professor.

In another line of her research, Swearer found that teachers aren't always able to identify bullies. Limber concurs. "Unfortunately, adults within the school environment dramatically overestimate their effectiveness in identifying and intervening in bullying situations," she says.

This can have serious implications, Swearer believes. For instance, to cut costs, some schools conduct intervention programs in group settings. "If bully-victims are in the group, they may cause problems for kids who are victims." It's better for bully-victims to be treated separately, she says.

According to Limber, mediation programs for bullies and victims are also problematic. Peer mediation may be appropriate in resolving conflict between students with equal power, but "bullying is a form of victimization," she says. "It's no more of a 'conflict' than child abuse or domestic violence."

The University of Illinois's Espelage is also doing research on bullying that she says is a radical departure from how previous studies have defined bullying. "Although folks have studied aggression and bullying, the focus in the United States has been on physical aggression. [Bullying has also been] seen as the behavior of only a small percentage of students," she explains. "We see bullying as a continuum in which many students engage in these behaviors at various levels."

For example, some studies focused on extreme cases of bullying by excluding students reporting low and moderate levels of bullying behavior or by collapsing participants into extreme categories on a bullying scale, continues Espelage. That approach "reduces the precision in measurement of bullying behavior and fails to consider an important aspect of the ecological framework--the school."

However, Espelage's research shows that adolescents don't fit neatly into strict categories of bullying or nonbullying. Instead, her findings indicate that bullying behavior is common, with most students reporting some involvement in bullying others. In fact, some of these students are unwilling participants in low-level bullying--teasing, name-calling, threatening and social ridiculing of peers--but are afraid to go against their peer group.

"The sixth-grader who wants to fit in will go along with harassing other kids," explains Espelage. "You can see the empathy in them. They're engaging in behavior that doesn't feel good to them. I feel for these kids the most."

Psychologists are advocating anti-bullying programs in schools through educating parents, teachers and children of the negative effects bullying has on both bully and victim.