In the years after the 1999 Columbine massacre, anti-bullying policy swept the country. By 2015, all 50 states had adopted anti-bullying laws. Schools added reporting systems, investigations, staff training, prevention curricula, and specialized personnel. An industry of programs, consultants, researchers, and lawyers has flourished alongside those mandates.

The movement’s most ambitious promise—that bullying can be eradicated—remains unproved. Some studies find modest benefits from anti-bullying programs. Others find no benefit or harmful effects. Federal data and reports concede that trends in bullying rates are unclear, but that they have not declined meaningfully in the last 25 years. In the 2021–22 school year, 100 percent of students reported experiencing, witnessing, or being aware of bullying.

Israel “Izzy” Kalman, a longtime school psychologist and psychotherapist, argues that “anti-bullyism” is an ideology that teaches children to assign responsibility for their distress to other people and report their grievances to authorities. It then forces schools to act as investigators, judges, and enforcers of ordinary peer conflict as if they are criminal offenses.

Kalman is the head of the Kalman Bullying Institute, creator of Bullies2Buddies.com, and lead author of the Be Strong Resilience Program. He has spent a quarter century arguing that the anti-bullying movement has intensified hostilities rather than reduced them, and he has made that case extensively at Psychology Today through his blog, Resilience to Bullying.

I spoke with Izzy about what counts as bullying, what anti-bullying laws require schools to do, why reporting can intensify conflict, and what he would teach instead. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length. The full video conversation contains much more for readers interested in the subject.

Carolyn D. Gorman: You spent decades as a school psychologist. What made you skeptical of the anti-bullying approach before it was fashionable to be skeptical?

Izzy Kalman: I had been successfully teaching kids and schools how to deal with bullying using basic psychological and therapeutic principles, when this bullying psychology comes out claiming they had the solution. It’s the opposite of everything I learned in psychology and psychotherapy, in philosophy and religion. It’s the opposite of what I discovered actually works. They were prescribing things that make the problem worse. Do the same things at home with your own children and you get endless sibling rivalry.

CG: You coined the term “anti-bullyism” to describe the ideology behind the modern anti-bullying movement. Why did you need a new word?

IK: The term “anti-bullying movement” doesn’t really tell you what it does. In reality, it’s an ideology, with a set of definitions and assumptions treated as fundamental truths. And no matter what evidence emerges to counter them, these truths are never rejected. So, since it is a complete belief system, it deserves to be called an “-ism.”

One of the basics of good psychotherapy is developing an internal locus of control—the belief that what happens to me in life is in my control. Anti-bullyism promotes the opposite: “The problem has nothing to do with you; it is totally the fault of the bully. You can’t solve the problem by yourself. The bully is too powerful. Everybody has to help you.”

CG: Many children are both bully and victim, and it isn’t always easy to tell who is what. What does that dichotomy create?

IK: According to the bullying philosophy, there is a victim and there’s a bully. The victim has nothing to do with the problem and only the bully is guilty. In real life, the alleged bully almost always insists that he’s the victim. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do that. He’s lying,” or, “He started with me.” Nobody thinks they’re a bully. Hitler didn’t think he was a bully. Very few parents say, “Oh yes, my child is a bully.”

I have this saying, which I actually love: The reason the anti-bullying movement is so phenomenally popular is the same reason that it’s failing so dismally–everybody thinks the bully is the other person. People love the teaching because it tells us the problem is not our fault, it’s their fault. Everybody loves to hear that.

CG: Dan Olweus, who created the field of bullying psychology, defined bullying as intentional, repeated harm involving a power imbalance. What’s wrong with that definition?

IK: There are three pillars: imbalance of power, intentionality, and repetition. In practice, each one is invalid and useless.

CG: Each one of those are subjective and can be perceived by the “victim,” and it’s the victim’s perspective that matters. So, what is the practical definition of bullying that schools work with?

IK: Anything that you don’t like people doing to you. It can be eye rolling—and many state laws actually list eye rolling as a form of bullying. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have to experience it, and it’s the school’s job to make sure you don’t.

CG: And what does that require schools to do?

IK: I describe it as a law-enforcement model. There’s a perpetrator—a criminal—and there’s a victim. The victim is innocent, the perpetrator is guilty, and the job of the system is to protect victims from bullies. You have to take the side of the victim, and you have to judge—who’s right, who’s wrong, who the bully is—and then punish or rehabilitate him.

The most fundamental instruction of anti-bullyism is that you have to tell the school authorities. And it makes sense—if you don’t tell them, how could the school do anything about it? The problem is that the school can only make it better if it has a reliable way of solving the problem. If it doesn’t, it will probably make it worse. And most schools don’t.

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CG: Olweus believed his program, the most common model implemented across the world, could eradicate bullying entirely. Did it?

IK: In his book he says, and I’m paraphrasing, there’s no reason we can’t get rid of bullying 100 percent. In his own research, schools that implemented his program properly for two years saw about a 50 percent reduction. It has never been replicated, especially not in the United States. Other research might find a 10 percent reduction, or a 15 percent reduction, but not 50 percent.

CG: Rates of bullying have not changed over time. A meta-analysis in School Psychology Review found not just no effects but actively harmful outcomes in 86 percent of programs. Why hasn’t the field treated that as disqualifying?

IK: Because anti-bullyism is an ideology, and what needs to be done is decided in advance. It’s been decided that schools have to actively intervene to stop bullying. So, when the research shows it’s not working, they don’t reject the program. They say, for some reason we didn’t find the right results—maybe it needs a better study. Even in that article you mention, the researchers did not conclude we should stop using these programs because they’re not working. The conclusion was that schools have to do more to stop bullying.

CG: A study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that students who reported bullying to school staff had higher odds of continued victimization. Why does the recommended response make things worse?

IK: Have you heard the saying that’s common in jail and also among kids, “snitches get stitches and end up in ditches?” Even if they’ve never heard it, kids discover very quickly that nobody likes them after they inform on their peers.

There’s a well-known concept in psychology called triangulation, or the drama triangle, where somebody plays a rescuer between a victim and an abuser. I’m not talking about criminal abuse—of course you have to get involved to stop people from being murdered or injured. But when you get in the middle of their fights, trying to take the side of the victim against the perpetrator, you make the two sides hate each other even more. At least one of them ends up hating you as well. And you prevent the two people from figuring out how to solve the problem with each other.

This is what happens in sibling rivalry. Parents’ intervention immediately escalates the hostility. They fight much harder over getting their parents on their side than what they originally were fighting about.

Now this is what the schools have to do: take the side of the one who looks like the victim against the one who looks like the bully. It immediately gets the two kids fighting even harder because each one—and their parents—want the school on their side.

CG: What should schools teach instead?

IK: Many bullying experts say the golden rule is the solution, but they’re doing it in a way that doesn’t work because they’re not understanding it. They think it means: don’t be a bully. The problem is nobody thinks they’re a bully. So, when we tell kids don’t be a bully, nobody thinks, “Oh, I have to stop?” They think, “that’s right, they have to stop bullying me!”

We don’t need the golden rule to teach people to be nice. It’s obvious that it’s good to be nice. The hard part is knowing what to do when people are mean to us. The answer of the golden rule is that you have to be nice back. That’s hard, because we’re programmed for reciprocity—to treat others the way they treat us. But if you’re mean to me and I’m mean back, we’ll be fighting all the time and become enemies. So I figure, what do I need enemies for? I know you are also programmed for reciprocity. So, even if you’re mean to me, I’m going to be nice back, and before long you’re going to start being nice to me. The golden rule puts me in control, and it creates a win-win outcome.

CG: You’ve called free speech the constitutional version of “sticks and stones.” Explain why free speech is a solution for bullying.

IK: The sticks and stones slogan is the age-old solution to becoming a victim of relentless teasing and taunting. It expresses the fundamental difference between verbal aggression and physical aggression. If you hit me with sticks and stones and I get hurt, who hurt me?

CG: I did.

IK: Yeah. If you call me an idiot and I feel hurt, what percentage does it depend on me?

CG: One hundred percent.

IK: That’s right. It’s totally up to me if I get upset by words. It’s not up to you. When kids understand the slogan, they can decide, it’s not sticks and stones, I don’t have to get upset. Then they don’t become a victim of verbal bullying.

But the modern version is, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can scar me forever or kill me.” They’re teaching kids that being called an idiot should hurt more than having their bones broken.

When I try to stop you from insulting me, it doesn’t make you stop. It makes you continue. But if I let you insult me, it’s no fun and you leave me alone. So, freedom of speech—letting people say what they want—is the solution to verbal bullying.

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CG: How should schools tell what to act on from what to leave alone?

IK: There are two general kinds of aggression. You won’t find this in psychology, but you will find it in law. One kind causes objective harm: if you do it to me and I get hurt, you are the one who hurt me. It’s not my choice whether I get hurt. Rape, vandalism, theft, extortion—these are treated like crimes in all cultures, and you have a right to be protected from them.

The other kind causes subjective harm: if you do it to me and I get hurt, I really hurt myself. The classic example is an insult. Is it moral to punish you for something I did to myself? In a country with freedom of speech, you’re allowed to insult me. But with anti-bullying laws, now you’re not. It’s treated like a crime.

CG: Where does your method fail? Are there children it won’t work for?

IK: There are some kids I failed with no matter how long I worked with them. If kids have serious neurological problems, intellectual deficits, or psychiatric conditions that prevent them from understanding what I teach, they won’t be able to do it. Or they understand it but have no impulse control—they’re so reactive it won’t work.

CG: And where do schools fail?

IK: Because anti-bullyism takes a law-enforcement approach, it turns schools into law-enforcement agencies and courts of law. They have to investigate. They have to interrogate. They have to judge. They have to punish. Would you go to a court where the judge is any Joe Shmoe off the street? School personnel are not qualified for that job. And judging makes people hate you. The winner is happy, the loser hates you, and the two sides still hate each other.

Today is the worst time in history to be a school administrator, because you are being held legally responsible for accomplishing the impossible. Schools are required by law to treat a problem in a way that’s been proven not to work, and then they get sued when it doesn’t.

CG: So, what should be reported?

IK: Criminal behavior, or potentially criminal behavior, has to be reported. If I know you’re bringing weapons to school, I should tell the school. That’s objective harm. People ask me, what if there’s a psychopath who smashes your face in? That’s a crime. You report it. It’s better to call things what they are.

CG: If a state legislature called you tomorrow and asked what to repeal, what would you say?

IK: Get rid of anti-bullying laws. All of the actions that deserve to be treated like crimes already are. Anti-bullying laws have only come to add things that were never considered crimes. The great majority of bullying is insults. We live in a country that has freedom of speech, and freedom of speech allows us to insult each other, but anti-bullying laws have repealed it. Social exclusion—I don’t want to be your friend. These are things that as individuals we should have the freedom to do.

CG: Is there anything the movement got right that you would keep?

IK: Yes. Insults and social exclusion and rumors are very serious problems. You can start out with the highest self-esteem, and if you’re put down by your peers every day and you’re getting upset by it, it will destroy you. So, kids deserve to be taught what to do about it—not treating these things like crimes, but as problems in life that we have to learn how to deal with.

The bullying problem can be solved. Not completely; there’ll never be no bullying. But you can make a dramatic impact, not by spending more money, but by spending less.

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