There's good news from the front lines in the fight against bullying: anti-bullying laws can help reduce aggression, both online and in real life.
Bullying affects one out of every five U.S. high school students. But anti-bullying laws do make a difference, researchersreported Monday in JAMA Pediatrics ā especially when those laws comply with guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education.
"It's kind of hard to believe, but about 15 years ago, we didn't have any anti-bullying laws," says Mark Hatzenbuehler, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "Now, all 50 states have some form of anti-bullying legislation. Even though there's been a lot of legislative activity around bullying, surprisingly there's been really little research on whether these laws are actually effective in reducing bullying."
[For more of this story, written by Lynne Shallcross, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...if-theyre-done-right]
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