The need for evidence-based intervention programmes

As bully/victim problems have gradually been placed on the official school agenda in many countries, a number of suggestions about their handling and prevention have been proposed. Some of these suggestions and approaches seem ill-conceived or maybe even counter-productive, such as an excessive focus on changing the victims' behaviour to make them less vulnerable to bullying. Others appear meaningful and potentially useful. A key problem, however, is that most of them have either failed to document positive results or have never been subjected to systematic research evaluation. Therefore it is difficult to know which programmes or measures actually work and which do not. Yet it is the results with the students that count, not how adults might feel about using the programme (user satisfaction).

The situation is well illustrated by the following facts. Recently, a US expert committee under the leadership of a respected criminologist, Professor Delbert Elliott, made a systematic evaluation of more than 400 presumably violence- (or problem-behaviour) preventing programmes according to certain minimum-level criteria (Elliott, 1999). These criteria were:

• that the programme had had positive effects on relevant target groups (students in this case) in a relatively rigorous scientific evaluation;

• that the effects had lasted for at least one year; and,

• that the programme had produced positive results in at least one site beyond the original one.

Only ten of the programmes (four of which are school-based and only one focusing on bully/victim problems) satisfied the specified criteria.