Anti-Bullying Expert Urges Parents to Teach Bystander Intervention After Bend School Shooting
Following the deadly shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, an anti-bullying specialist calls on families to teach children to act safely when they witness bullying, citing research linking persistent abuse to school attacks.
An anti-bullying specialist is urging parents to teach their children a simple lesson in the wake of the deadly shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon: when they witness bullying, they have a responsibility to act safely and compassionately. The call comes as the central Oregon community mourns three children and a teacher killed in the Oct. 15 attack, and as a 7-year-old girl critically injured in the shooting continues to fight for her life.
The expert, who has worked with targets of bullying for more than 25 years and has witnessed more than 20,000 students publicly apologize for bullying-related behavior, argues that bullying is a cultural problem rather than merely a school problem. While authorities have not established a motive for the 16-year-old shooter and there is no evidence at this point that bullying played a role in the Silver Rail attack, research into past targeted school attacks shows why the behavior remains one communities should take seriously.
A Secret Service report titled «Protecting America's Schools» examined 41 targeted school attacks. Among the 35 attackers whose backgrounds were analyzed — all male — 80% had experienced bullying, and for 57% that bullying was persistent. The specialist cautions against treating severe mental illness as the automatic explanation for school shootings, noting that most people with severe mental illness are not violent and that equating psychiatric diagnoses with dangerousness stigmatizes people who need care while distracting from specific behaviors that should concern communities.
Having worked with countless bullying targets, the specialist describes how persistent abuse can leave children emotionally inflamed. Some turn their pain inward, while others express it outwardly through anger, aggression and sometimes violence. Too many children, the expert argues, are expected to endure a level of persistent abuse that no adult would tolerate. Telling a child to ignore cruelty is not intervention, and requiring an apology without checking whether the abuse has stopped is not accountability. Moving the targeted child to another classroom or school while leaving the aggressor unchecked only deepens the injustice and resentment.
Instead, the specialist says students need trustworthy adults and clear reporting options, including anonymous reporting, along with protection against retaliation. When reporting makes life worse, children learn to remain silent precisely when adults most need information. Bystanders, the expert argues, possess the greatest potential power in what the specialist calls the theater of bullying. Bullies often seek an audience, and that audience can either reward cruelty through laughter, encouragement or silence, or help stop it through courageous action.
To help break the connection between persistent bullying and the risk of school violence, the specialist proposes a national commitment that begins at the dinner table. Families are asked to adopt a pledge that when children witness bullying, they will take at least one of three actions: comfort the targeted child afterward; report — not tattle — what they saw or heard; or intervene directly, when safe, using assertive but nonviolent words.
The shooting has left families facing a grief no parent, spouse or loved one should have to endure. Children who should be coming home to their families will never walk through those doors again, and a teacher who devoted a life to educating and caring for children is gone. Among the critically injured is 7-year-old Saylor, a child previously honored in Bend as a «Sparrow» through a program that supports children facing serious medical challenges. Already familiar with adversity, she is now fighting for her life after being shot in the face.
The specialist acknowledges that compassionate bystander intervention will not stop every school shooting, but argues it can stop complacency. That begins, the expert writes, when adults teach children that witnessing bullying carries a responsibility to act safely and compassionately — and that bullying does not have to be an ordinary part of growing up, while standing against it should become an ordinary part of raising children.
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