Legislation outlining a zero tolerance policy on bullying is being considered in Japan after a thirteen year-old boy was driven to suicide by classmates, reports Justin McCurry in the Christian Science Monitor.

The young boy, named Hiroki, jumped off the fourteenth floor of his apartment building after being subjected to daily verbal and physical abuse from his classmates. His teachers only issued a verbal warning to the offenders, which did nothing to stop the bullying.

This type of bullying is seen as a ‘rite of passage’ in highly competitive Japanese school systems, but as Hiroki’s case shows, it can lead to tragic consequences.

And data shows that bullying in Japan is on the rise:

“Statistics on school bullying vary, but new official data reveal a worrying trend. Regional legal affairs bureaus in Japan responded to a record 3,988 cases last year, an increase of more than 20 percent from 2011, the justice ministry said. The national police agency, meanwhile, said it had investigated 260 cases of school bullying in 2012, well up from the 113 cases in 2011.”

At the end of June, the pending legislative fix will be voted on as part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s aggressive education reform efforts.

The legislation requires outside parties to address bullying cases where a student’s life is in jeopardy. Police are to investigate any situation where there is an alleged crime, and guidance will be given to both the victims and perpetrators.

Teachers are encouraged to assert more control and to suspend bullies, and parents and teachers are to report any case of bullying to school authorities. There will also be a moral education class introduced into elementary and middles school curricula that the bill’s authors hope will reverse the troubling trend of increasingly-common bullying.

Critiqs say that due to the environment of the schools, not much is likely to change. In Japan’s high-pressure, high-achievement education system, teachers can be reluctant to report bullying because they are afraid to be seen as incompetent. The bill does not address the pressure of academic and conformity or the problems that impersonal, overcrowded classrooms can create.

“Mr. Naito, who has spent decades studying bullying, says an improvement in bullying statistics is unlikely without practical changes to the school environment. He describes Japan’s schools as “untouchable communities” where students have no choice but to be there. “In an environment where students are forced to spend almost all their time together, they live under their own set of rules that aren’t always acceptable in society,” he says. “Students are forced to follow the pack, to think the way everyone else is thinking.”"

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Anti-bullying advocates would get a lot further in their efforts if they did away with words like “bullying,”researchers explained to USA Today’s Greg Toppo. The word has now grown to cover too broad a scope of behavior – anything from an eye roll to simple lack of desire to end a friendship all the way down to sexual and physical assault. Such range of meaning makes it harder to deliver lessons on bullying to students that they will absorb and take to heart instead of ignore.

Either what schools consider bullying needs to be substantially upgraded, or the worst of the worst behavior needs to be given a new name.

Educators have been “spinning our wheels for decades” in a bid to treat bullying, but they’re often hampered by policies that require mistreatment to be repetitive, for example, part of the classic definition of bullying. That focus also obscures whether specific acts are happening more or less, she said.

Espelage co-led a group of researchers that worked for a year to produce a new primer on bullying, released here on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, the USA’s largest education research organization. The association commissioned the research last year in the wake of several high-profile bullying cases and school shootings.

The fact that “bully” can now mean so many things – most of them relatively innocuous – creates big programs for school systems that are looking to adopt a comprehensive anti-bullying policy. For example, such efforts in New Jersey have galvanized officials, parents and even students themselves to fight what they see are rules that are too restrictive and don’t give school leaders any kind of flexibility.

Speaking in a low voice, the 15-year-old addressed the issue at hand: Whether he had called a girl in his eighth-grade class “horse,” “fat” or “fat **s” — and whether any comments made violated what has been called the toughest anti-bullying law in the country.

“I never made any remarks other than horse,” the teen testified. “I did not have any intent.”

The case before Administrative Law Judge Jeffrey Gerson was brought by the boy and his father to appeal the Ridgewood School Board’s decision that the teen bullied a middle school classmate last year.

The 15-year-old’s adventures in the legal system are not unique. According to NJ.com, students accused of bullying by their schools under the new anti-bullying measure are taking to the courts to clear their names in record numbers.

At least 16 students, parents or teachers have filed appeals with the commissioner of education since New Jersey’s Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights took effect in fall 2011; two have been decided so far. An untold number of others — the state does not keep track — have challenged school bullying findings to their local school boards, the first step in the appeal process.

At the moment 16 does not seem like a very high number — especially when compared to more than 12,000 kids who are cited for bullying each year. But there’s every indication that the numbers will grow and the legal system might find itself overwhelmed.

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One of the main barriers to putting in place anti-bullying policies in middle schools is the simple fact that middle-schoolers think bullies are cool. A recent study of 2,000 students at 11 middle schools around Los Angeles found that when students were asked to identify their most respected peers and those engaging in nasty behavior, the lists were often quite similar.

The students were surveyed in the spring of their 7th year and subsequently in the fall and spring of their 8th year. The researchers found that students who were named as the coolest in any of the three surveys were often also singled out as the most aggressive or the meanest in the other two.

“The ones who are cool bully more, and the ones who bully more are seen as cool,” study researcher Jaana Juvonen, a UCLA professor of psychology, said in a statement. “What was particularly interesting was that the form of aggression, whether highly visible and clearly confrontational or not, did not matter. Pushing or shoving and gossiping worked the same for boys and girls.”

This isn’t the first study that showed that kids of that age often viewed their most aggressive classmates as the ones most worth emulating. This study, however, also points to why many anti-bullying efforts fail at that age, since they don’t take into account the dynamic that makes kids admire and wish to be like the bullies around them.

A group of psychologists studied nearly 2,000 students at 11 middle schools in Los Angeles. They conducted surveys in the spring of 7th grade and the fall and spring of 8th grade, in which they asked the students to name their peers who were considered the “coolest,” as well as those who “start fights or push other kids around” and those who “spread nasty rumors about other kids.”

To tackle this disconnect, Juvonen said that a more subtle approach is called for. Instead of focusing on bullies, educators should look at influencing bystanders and asking them to step in or report incidents that they witness. It is important to let them know that doing nothing translates to tacit approval of this kind of behavior, making them in a way complicit in the abuse of other kids.

Additional research has shown that bullies are actually quite astute when choosing their victims. They are most likely to focus on those who are otherwise unpopular and unlikely to attract support from their peers.

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Cyberbullying isn’t just wrong in Vernon County, Wisconsin. After this week, electronic messages that annoy, offend or ridicule are now criminal. Yesterday, the county voted to approve the anti-cyberbullying ordinance that was approved by the county board of supervisors last month.

The penalty is fairly stiff. If anyone is found guilty of violating the ordinance, they could be fined up to $500 and sentenced to a maximum of 30 days in jail. With this move, Vernon is following the lead of other municipalities around the state that have put a similar rule on the books over the last several years.

According to the Student Press Law Center, the text of the new ordinance doesn’t specifically mention students, but according to the Vernon County Sheriff John Spears, they will be the law’s primary targets. He said making cyberbullying illegal in the county will go a long way to helping curb the practice. He added that it would also provide an effective tool in dealing with bullies.

However, not everyone was as optimistic that the rule would make a difference.

Justin Patchin, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, said that he was contacted by the county before the ordinance was passed to give input on it. Patchin said he’s skeptical of the effectiveness of Vernon County’s law as well as those passed elsewhere.

Patchin said that there do not seem to be any incidents where anyone was charged under the anti-bullying measure, which makes judging their effectiveness a difficult task. He thought, however, that Vernon’s measure and similar ones elsewhere weren’t likely to have much of an impact.

Wisconsin already has an anti-bullying measure on the books, though it doesn’t specifically single out harassment that happens over text messages and social media.

Two other state laws have been used in cases of cyberbullying, Patchin said. A 2010 school safety law requires school districts to draft their own policy involving bullying of any type, and the state’s Unlawful Use of Computerized Communication Systems law can be used in criminal cases of bullying through electronic devices. That law criminalizes only“a pattern of conduct composed of a series of acts over a period of time.”

Patchin explained that laws prohibiting cyberbullying were passed in 16 states, so to fill the gap, a number of smaller municipalities drafted measures prohibiting it on their own. Patchin himself believes that criminalizing this kind of conduct is going too far, and the best approach to stop this kind of harassment is to address it informally and on an individual basis.

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Kids, especially teens, might be sick to death of talking about bullying in all its forms, but that doesn’t mean that the problem is any less acute or any easier to deal with. According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education, over 13 million children are bullied in the country each year, with some experiencing harassment so severe that parents feel that they have no choice but to keep them home from school.

Up to now, parents were at a loss as to how they can harness this deluge of informationto deliver an effective anti-bullying message to their children. Now, several experts in both childhood development and anti-harassment in particular offer a few solutions.

The first comes from Rosalind Wiseman, who was one of the first to shed light on the extent of harassment being inflicted on bullying victims — especially instances of girl-on-girl harassment. As the author of the popular Queen Bees and Wonnabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence – the bestseller on which the movie Mean Girls was based – she is all too familiar with fatigue surrounding the word “bully.”

Wiseman, along with Cynthia Lowen, producer and writer of the 2011 documentary “Bully,” recommends that parents change the conversation, moving away from words that kids are likely to hear in the course of being lectured on the evils of harassment and the importance of getting along. Instead of talking about bullying in general, parents can focus on specific behaviors like rumor spreading, ostracism or name-calling.

Don’t assume they’ll tell you they’re being bullied. “If you ask your teenager if things are going OK at school, there’s a good chance he or she will tell you things are fine,” says Carrie Goldman, author of “Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear” (HarperOne). “It’s easy to miss things until they blow up in your face.”

Parents who want their kids to talk to them about the bad things they’re experiencing in school need to learn how to be good listeners, experts say. Teens are reluctant to share as is, but they will be even more reticent if they think that letting parents know they’re struggling will result in heedless action like a confrontation with the school administrators or a fight with the bully’s parents over the demands that harassment cease.

“Develop a plan of what your child and you want to have happen,” says Lowen. “Is it a matter of asking the principal to reassign a locker to somewhere in the building with more supervision? Is it asking a teacher to stand in the hall between classes? Is it helping your teen put together a list of things they want to bring to the principal? Do they want a counselor present?

However, being open also means accepting news that it’s your own child who is the perpetrator. For those parents who receive that unwelcome news, the first thing that Lowen recommends is to accept it and to fight the impulse to deny, deny, deny.

“Work together to get to the bottom of the issue,” she says. “Use it as an opportunity to say, ‘Things have gotten totally off-track here. How do we get this back on track?’ If your child has a lot of social cachet. If they are someone other kids look up to. If they’re a big bruiser of a kid. How can these qualities be used to be a leader among their peers, rather than someone who’s hurting their peers?”

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The story is, unfortunately, unremarkable: a girl with a disease that put her mental age at around 8 was mercilessly teased by bullies roaming the halls of her high school. But thanks to some football players from Queen Creek High School in Arizona, the story’s ending was unique.

Chy Johnson, a sophomore at Queen Creek, suffers from a congenital birth defect – microcephaly – which means that she is severely developmentally delayed. Not so delayed, however, as to not be hurt by the constant teasing and beatings that she was subjected to within Queen Creek’s walls. Her mother, Liz, was frantic. Chy was coming home every day upset and crying.

Attempting to get teachers and administrators to intervene on Chy’s behalf went nowhere. Running out of options, Liz turned to an unlikely ally – the quarterback of Queen Creek’s undefeated football team, Carson Jones. Liz hoped that Jones, who accompanied Chy to the Special Olympics one year, could act as her advocate once again.

On his Facebook page, Liz asked him to look out for Chy and maybe give her some names of the kids doing the most damage so she could have something concrete to take to the school administrators.

But Carson Jones did something better than that. Instead of ratting other kids out, he decided to take one in — Chy.

He started asking her to eat at the cool kids’ lunch table with him and his teammates. “I just thought that if they saw her with us every day, maybe they’d start treating her better,” Carson says. “Telling on kids would’ve just caused more problems.”

Jones got other seniors on the team involved as well. Tucker Workman, the team’s starting running back, organized his teammates to walk with Chy from class to class. In the classes they all shared, there was always a place for Chy to seat, right next to the players. Having the protection of the school’s athletes also allowed Chy to eat lunch in the main school cafeteria, at the popular kids’ table, no less, instead of the stuffy and dark special-education lunchroom.

And the best thing is? The football players didn’t tell anybody.

“I didn’t know about any of this until three weeks ago,” says Carson’s mom, Rondalee, who’s raising four boys and a daughter by herself. “He finally showed me an article they wrote here locally. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Why didn’t you tell me this?’”

All of a sudden, Chy started coming home as her bubbly self again. When her mom asked why she was so happy, she said, “I’m eating lunch with my boys!”

The boys take care of Chy, and she takes care of the boys. Carson, carrying a GPA of 4.4, got in a car accident last week; since then, Chy is always trying to carry his backpack. “I know his neck hurts,” she says.

Best of all, the plan is in place for next year when Jones, along with many of the other players looking after Chy, graduates Queen Creek. Jones’ younger brother Curtis, who is a sophomore like Chy, and a football player like Carson, has already volunteered to take over starting next fall.

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A recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests that teenagers with an autism spectrum disorder are up to four times more likely to be bullied at school than their peers from the general population. Andrew M. Seaman, writing for Reuters, reports that the estimated rate of bullying victims among kids generally is 11%, but the study suggests that nearly half of those with an ASD are being bullied at school.

Previous studies have found that children who are bullied are at higher risk of depression and have higher incidences of anxiety and loneliness. These children also do much worse academically than those who are not being picked on. This is especially disturbing for those concerned with enabling positive academic outcomes for those with an ASD as they are already statistically more likely to struggle in school than other kids and with the added negative effects of bullying are now facing a dual problem.

“I would argue that the bullying interventions that we’re using now, if not tailored, are ineffective,” said Paul R. Sterzing, the study’s lead author from the University of California, Berkley.

Researchers argue that schools should target their anti-bullying work towards more vulnerable populations such as those with an ASD or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Sterzing added that the problem risks growing further as the number of kids being diagnosed with a form of autism keeps increasing. Latest estimates suggest that one in 88 children in the US have a disorder somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Using records from a 2001 survey of 920 parents, Sterzing and his colleagues found that 46 percent of parents said their autistic teenagers were the victims of bullying and 15 percent thought their children were bullies themselves. Nine percent of moms and dads said their kids were both victims and bullies.

Debra J. Pepler wasn’t involved in the study, but does research on bullying among vulnerable child populations at York University. She said that there are strategies that parents and teachers could employ to reduce the rate of bullying towards children suffering from an ASD such as ‘circles of support’ being created within classrooms. These are groups of children who are educated properly regarding the victim’s affliction and are then able to provide help and support.

Sterzing told Reuters Health that teens with autism and ADHD or those who had autism and were in regular classes were both especially likely to be victims of bullying.

That, however, does not mean kids with autism should be separated from their peers and put in special education classes. Instead, Sterzing said it could mean that regular classes haven’t been doing a good job of including kids with autism.

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The video of a bullying incident involving Upstate New York bus monitor Karen Klein became an overnight internet sensation that led to a fundraising campaign that collected more than $700,000 for her to take a vacation. But it also highlighted that aggressive behavior towards adults charged with policing student conduct on school buses isn’t as rare as people would like to believe. Some bus monitors interviewed by The Wall Street Journal recount incidents that were even more horrific than the verbal abuse hurled at Klein — including incidents of physical violence, sexual harassment, and extortion.

These incidents raise the question of how effective the bus monitor system is in ensuring that students taking the school bus arrive where they’re going safely.

Bus monitors can be crucial in keeping students in line and can be the first to spot trouble at home. And at least one student says that without the aides, bus rides would be chaos. But the job can be grueling: The pay is low, the hours odd and fractured and their power to actually solve disciplinary problems limited, bus monitors and union officials said.

Betty Martin has been riding on school buses for more than two decades, and she said that in these years her ability to exercise authority over her charges has been steadily eroding. When she began, all that it took to bring a misbehaving children into line was threatening to report them to school authorities or notify their families. Now kids, especially the worst-behaved ones, tend to brush off these kinds of warnings.

“Now if you say that to a child it’s like, ‘So what? Tell them,’” said Martin, a bus aide in Buffalo who recounted cases where colleagues had earrings ripped from their ears and were subjected to other physical attacks. “You can’t touch them, you can’t do anything to them, and a lot of times, they have parents who feel the exact same way.”

In Klein’s case, except for a student poking her with a textbook, the incident didn’t escalate beyond verbal taunts. Cheryl Armstrong, who is the transportation director for Greece Central Schools, which employed Klein until she retired this summer, said that it was distressing to see the bus monitor allow children to so thoroughly strip her of authority.

Students who don’t respond to a monitor’s verbal commands are supposed to be written up for follow-up discipline by the school, transportation supervisors said. The bus driver can radio for help and even call 911 in extreme cases. After the video became public, the district suspended four seventh-grade boys from school for a year.

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A teacher has been captured on mobile phone video footage joining in with the abuse of a small boy during a reading and math preparation class.

Sean Robinson of The News Tribune reports that the footage shows a small boy being dragged around a classroom by a dozen other students who peeled off his socks, stuffed one in his mouth and wrote over his feet. They also held a pillow over his face, covered him with chairs and held him like a hammock. The footage of the incident lasts for 15 minutes and at one point teacher John Rosi, instead of stopping the abuse, squats over the child concerned with his rear pointed towards the boys face and says, ‘I’m feeling kinda gassy.’

The footage ends when Rosi eventually tells the students to get back to their lessons with only a couple of minutes of class remaining. During the 15 minute incident, Rosi was fully aware he was being recorded, even mugging for the camera.

“I was aware the student reactions were being video recorded,” Rosi wrote in a Feb. 10 letter to district investigators. “I can honestly say that at the time I did not believe that any of the children were at risk of harm during their interactions. Nor did I view the incident as anything more than harmless childhood horse play and a chance for the kids to take a break from the daily grind.”

In his statement, Rosi goes on to mention his years as a wrestling coach to prove that he would be aware of the line between horseplay and potential harm. He also said he considered the victim to be a great kid who was happy to indulge in horseplay in the past.

As punishment for the February incident, Rosi was suspended for 10 days and shifted out of the preparation classrooms. He signed a ‘last chance’ agreement in April that recognizes his suspension was in lieu of termination. He now works at different school.

The boy’s parents are still furious and have requested a criminal investigation. They consider it a clear case of extended bullying and are angry that Peninsula District officials have consistently downplayed the seriousness of the attack, instead categorizing it as a mixture of roughhousing and poor classroom management.

“(Rosi) is completely ignorant of the fact that he’s got a whole classroom hazing one kid,” said the boy’s father, interviewed Monday by The News Tribune. “They classified it as roughhousing. But it’s not 14 kids wrestling each other. It’s a dozen kids using my son to demonstrate their dominance over him.”

Acting Superintendent Chuck Cuzetto says that the incident was investigated and appropriate disciplinary and remedial action was taken. The boy’s parents worry that even though they’ve removed their child from the school and sent him to private school, the district still has significant problems that could lead to another boy replacing their son as classroom victim.

“I don’t think that they’ve addressed the dangers to the students,” the father said. “They’ve never regarded this as a bullying incident or a psychologically traumatizing incident for our son.”

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Earlier this year, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton appointed a task force to review the state laws that currently protect victims of bullying. The goal of the task force is to recommend alterations to the law to make sure that it deals adequately with the kinds of bullying incidents common in a more technologically-advanced age. In addition, last week Dayton called on school districts around the state to appoint an administrator to head local anti-bullying efforts aimed at making every student feel secure when attending class.

During his announcement, Dayton said that it was important that when it came to bullying and harassment in schools, each district had someone to whom they could point and say “The buck stops here!” That is the only way, he added, that administrators can make sure that students and their parents know that their concerns were being addressed.

Currently, all incidents of school bullying are covered by a law that is merely 37 words long. For some time, lawmakers as well as educators have called for it to be expanded and strengthened. Dayton himself said that the law currently rated “a D-minus, at best.”

“It really is so painful to read and think about,” Dayton told task force members, referring to pages of testimony from students and parents whose children were bullied or harassed for things like physical or learning disabilities or sexual orientation. “It is really disgraceful (that) in Minnesota, it has received such scant attention.”

The task force, comprising several dozen educators, lawmakers and members of the law enforcement community, has been working on an update to the law since this February. Its initial findings indicate that the law currently on the books is ineffective and should be entirely scrapped and replaced with one that defines bullying more comprehensively. Proponents hope that their draft proposal will be ready in time for the state legislature to take it up when it reconvenes this fall.

The task force’s report also advised schools to partner with local groups to fight bullying and pointed out the necessity of accurate record keeping on the district level of every reported incident.

Minnesota now tracks incidences of discipline, but those records are not as detailed as task force members thought they should be, something the governor called “a serious oversight.”

Some prominent bullying cases came out of the Anoka-Hennepin schools, where students said they were harassed because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation. District officials settled a lawsuit this year in connection with those harassment claims.

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