Prenatal and family precursors of bullying involvement in childhood and their consequences into early adulthood

关于欺凌的研究始于1982年，当时挪威有三个小男孩在短时间内自杀，他们都留下了被同龄人欺负的纸条。自那以后，更多的儿童因受欺凌而自杀。自杀是逃避恶霸最极端的方式。如果不是自我伤害，成为欺凌的受害者会在童年时期导致一系列心理健康和身体健康问题。欺凌造成伤害的证据越来越多，奥巴马总统和第一夫人于2011年3月组织了一次关于防止欺凌的会议。用总统的话来说，“如果这次会议有一个目标的话，那就是消除欺凌只是一种无害的成人仪式或成长中不可避免的一部分的神话。它不是。”然而，孩子们毕业后是否能把他们的经历放在一边，或者参与欺凌是否会给受影响的孩子的生活蒙上长长的阴影，这些都是未知的。本研究的第一个目的是找出被欺负对青少年健康、工作生活和成功、犯罪参与和社会适应的长期影响。这将通过两项长期研究——英国的雅芳纵向研究（ALSPAC）和美国的大烟山研究（GSMS）——来研究童年时期的欺凌对年轻成人结果的影响，这两项研究分别调查了18岁和26岁的儿童。迄今为止，大多数打击欺凌的方法都集中在学校。学校干预已被证明对减少欺凌率有一些但有限的影响。为了在学校环境之外制定新的创新预防或干预策略，重要的是要了解是什么使儿童在进入学校之前就可能成为欺凌的目标。家庭是孩子们学习行为准则，与父母和兄弟姐妹协商，或者观察父母和兄弟姐妹如何对待彼此和处理冲突的主要场所。因此，当父母在养育子女时严厉或充满敌意或经常相互打架时，这会影响孩子如何应对同龄人的欺凌吗？此外，甚至在孩子出生前，怀孕期间的压力就会影响大脑等器官的发育，以及孩子日后应对压力的方式。目前尚不清楚的是，怀孕期间的压力是否会使一些孩子更容易成为欺凌的对象，因为他们很容易表现出不安或开始哭泣等反应。恶霸们的目标是那些表现出强烈情绪反应的孩子。最后，作为少数民族的一员可能会导致更多的欺凌。第二个目标是找出怀孕期间的压力（家庭逆境、母亲焦虑和抑郁）、学龄前的家庭关系（即有问题的伴侣关系、养育子女）和个人特征（孩子的情绪、种族）是否能预测谁会在学龄时成为受害者或欺凌者。调查结果将有助于制定新的战略，以加强家庭和儿童，防止儿童成为欺凌的目标或利用欺凌来折磨其他儿童。来源:http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/10/president-obama-first-lady-white-house-conference-bullying-prevention 1

Research on bullying started in earnest in 1982 when three young boys killed themselves in short succession in Norway, all leaving notes that they had been bullied by their peers. Many more suicides in children attributed to bullying have occurred since then. Killing oneself is the most extreme form of escaping the bullies. If not self-harm, being a victim of bullying can lead to a range of mental health and physical health problems in childhood. The increasing evidence of harm by bullying led to a conference on the prevention of bullying organised by President Obama and the First Lady in March 2011. In the President's words "If there's one goal of this conference, it's to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up. It's not." (1)However, whether children can put their experiences aside once they graduate from school, or whether involvement in bullying throws a long shadow over the lives of affected children is unknown. The first objective of this study is to find out about the long term effects of being bullied on health, work life and success, crime involvement and social adaptation in young adulthood. This will be accomplished by studying the effect of bullying in childhood on young adult outcome in two long term studies, the Avon Longitudinal Study in the UK (ALSPAC) and the Great Smoky Mountain Study in the USA (GSMS) that investigated children up to 18 and 26 years, respectively.Most approaches to beat bullying to date have focussed on schools. School interventions have been shown to have some but limited effects on reducing rates of bullying. To develop new innovative prevention or intervention strategies beyond the school setting, it is important to understand what makes children likely targets of bullies even before they enter school. Families are the primary place where children learn rules of how to behave, negotiate with their parents and siblings, or where they observe how parents and siblings treat each other and deal with conflicts. Thus when parents are harsh or hostile in their parenting or often fight with each other, does it affect how children deal with bullying by peers? Furthermore, even before the child is born, stress in pregnancy can affect the development of organs such as the brain and how children later deal with stress. Unknown is whether stress in pregnancy may make some children more likely to become targets of bullying because they show easily a reaction such as getting upset or start crying. Bullies home in on children who show strong emotional reactions. Finally, being a member of an ethnic minority group may result in more bullying. The second objective is to find out whether stress in pregnancy (family adversity, maternal anxiety and depression), family relations in the preschool years (i.e. problematic partner relationships, parenting) and individual characteristics (how emotional the child is, ethnicity) predicts who becomes a victim or bully at school age.The findings will help to develop new strategies to strengthen families and children and prevent children from becoming the target of bullying or use bullying to torment other children. Sources:1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/10/president-obama-first-lady-white-house-conference-bullying-prevention