Legal requirements and nationally circulated materials against school bullying in European countries

Abstract

School bullying has become the focus of attention in many countries in the last 20 years, in part as a result of systematic academic research on the problem, and sometimes extensive media publicity. One of the outcomes of this attention has been an effort on the part of governments and educational authorities in many countries to tackle the problem through various initiatives, including the setting up of anti-bullying legal guidelines that schools must observe. In this article we discuss definitional issues and summarize recent research on school bullying; and then present information on the legal guidelines/requirements against bullying produced by Ministries of Education or equivalent government departments in all EU member states and four associated or candidate states. In addition, we summarize information on anti-bullying materials distributed to schools on a large (national/regional) scale. Our findings show that only a few European countries have specific legal requirements against bullying, although more have requirements on the more general problem of violence at schools. Many countries have produced and distributed anti-bullying materials to schools, although the content and format of these vary considerably. A few European countries still have no anti-bullying actions at a national level. We discuss the policy implications of these findings.