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Speak Up

Recess was Allie Long's favourite part of the day until the second grade, when some of her friends on the playground pressured her to join their whisper campaign against a classmate.

Allie shrugged. She didn't want to hear their rumour or help spread it around. In an instant, her best friends since kindergarten became her tormenters.

"They started taunting and teasing her," said Allie's mom, Trudy Ludwig. "She was on this play structure and they blocked all of the exits and wouldn't let her off. They started moving closer to her. Allie just freaked out. One of the girls realized it was getting out of hand and got a teacher to help."

Bullying among adolescents has captured the attention of researchers, educators and parents alarmed by a parade of mean girls and cyber-bullies caught in mid-punch on viral video. But such aggression may not just happen in a whirl of adolescent hormones, some in the growing anti-bully movement argue.

Some older bullies were "Barbie brats" first.

In Allie's case, the kids were talked to, but things weren't the same at her Beaverton, Ore., school.

"My daughter cried herself to sleep on and off for several months," Ludwig said. "She had stomachaches. The phone stopped ringing. No playdates. No invitations to sleepovers."

They were just seven years old.

Meline Kevorkian, a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., researcher and public speaker on bullying, surveyed 167 educators last year and 25 per cent indicated bullying occurs most in elementary schools. Research also indicates that three-quarters of eight- to 11-year-olds report they've been bullied, with more than half identifying it as a "big" problem, Kevorkian said.

"It could be you wear the wrong shoes or the wrong socks. If you didn't go to the Hannah Montana concert. Your lunch smells. You can't wear certain bows in your hair," she said. "It's not that the victims are all going to grow up and shoot kids in their high school, but it's the message that making fun of people will make you popular."

Rumour-spreading, teasing, exclusive clubs, secrets. What social scientists describe as "relational aggression" is often written off among younger kids as routine rites of passage not worthy of extra hands-on attention, Kevorkian and other anti-bully experts said. Parents of targeted children agreed.

"Everybody seems under the impression that their child is well behaved in all settings," said Lisa Borre, whose nine-year-old son, Franklin, loves sports but is small for his age and often struggles for equal time during playground baseball and basketball games in Libertyville, Ill.

"Nobody is willing to believe their children might behave differently on the playground," she said. "I just sort of felt like at this age the kids would still be gentler, kinder, would still behave more like little children. It's almost like a smaller version of an adult world that he's dealing with."

Ludwig, who was inspired by her now 14-year-old daughter's experience to write four picture books on bullying, said girls in particular often connect by sharing secrets that can later be turned into weapons. Such verbal abuse and social manipulation, which is on the rise in boys, "flies under the radar" of harried parents, teachers or babysitters.

"It's evident in preschool. 'If you don't let me play with that toy I won't invite you to my birthday party,'" Ludwig said. "Intentional exclusion is bullying. Giving the silent treatment is bullying. It's not a part of growing up. It's not something kids can work out themselves. It's not normal conflict. We've normalized this abnormal behaviour in our society."

Little research has tracked bullying among the very young, but the topic is beginning to gain momentum. Intervention programs, including fifth-graders tapped as peer mediators on playgrounds, began popping up a few years ago in elementary schools, but the institutional response to bullying is often piecemeal or inconsistent, advocates said.