Jeffery W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks: Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem

In Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem, authors Jeffery W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks provide discussion, research, theories, and examples of real life situations surrounding the issue of school bullying. The authors highlight school bullying as a worldwide epidemic, perceived by most as a serious social problem. The book explains how our culture and the media often inadvertently perpetuate the issue of school bullying through the use of framing and through reinforcing societal norms. A number of prevention strategies are discussed that have been designed and implemented in hopes of effectively dealing with this growing epidemic, but as the authors point out throughout the book, these prevention mechanisms fail to take into account the multiple levels of influence on bullying. By dealing with this perceived social problem on all levels, and taking into account both mico and marco-levels when implementing prevention mechanisms, the authors reveal how society can stop school bullying from expanding. Chapter 1 discusses the shifting construction of bullying as a social problem. The authors discuss how news media plays a massive role in the public’s understanding of events and issues. The news media’s constructions of school bullying were found to have three analytical themes. The first being domain expansion, where the meaning of bullying grew in various directions. This analytical theme portrayed by the media had serious implications as it ignored important distinctions and often conflated something like consensual teasing with serious violence. The second analytical theme discussed was the media’s identification of the causes of bullying through the use of explanatory shifting. The media would go from an individual focus to concentrating on the larger society and culture, and then onto the familial institutional (schools) level, before finally returning focus back onto the individual. The third theme exemplified by the media was one of oversimplification, in which the media oversimplified bullying by defining it as including a wide range of behaviors that encompassed a wide range of responses. In addition to discussing the medias’ effect on bullying, the authors also indicate how youth aggression, gender, and sexuality play a role in school bullying. This chapter comprehensively addressed how school bullying has become an increased social problem. Chapter 2 explores the early construction of school bullying as an individual-level problem. This individuallevel problem relied on a narrative in which bullying represented a struggle between vulnerable victims in need of protection and dangerous bullies in need of social control. Studies showed that children were more susceptible to being bullied if they had physical and psychological differences. The news media further typified these victims as being weak or damaged, but never took into account whether bullying was the cause or result of these psychological differences. Conversely, bullies were grouped into four categories: compensators, who were those with lowself-esteem; elites, who were the popular and powerful jocks; predators, who were individuals whose only motivation seemed to be to hurt others; and the wounded, who were those acting out to the aggression that they had been subjected to in the home. It was fairly rare for articles or broadcasts to ever discuss the potential harm bullies posed to themselves. Rather, the sole focus during this early construction was to diagnose bullies in order to explain why they bullied. This chapter successfully provided