79 Best Practices in Bullying Prevention Erika Felix Michael Furlong University of California, Santa Barbara OVERVIEW Teasing/harassment is different from females to males, I think. Females are like vipers; they strike quickly and only the strongest can hold them off. Females exclude, tease, and drop snide comments easily. Males, however (I don’t really know/I’m guessing), are like bears, using muscle and brawn over brain. —Seventh-grade student School bullying takes a profound toll on the psycho- logical, social, and academic well-being of students (Furlong, Soliz, Simental, & Greif, 2004). Some students face verbal, physical, and relational bullying daily at school. If adults faced this kind of chronic victimization in the workplace, they would likely quit their jobs; however, students must attend school, and this makes it difficult for them to avoid perpetrators. Bullying decreases the capacity of schools to serve as a protective influence in the lives of the students. Therefore, it is imperative that schools have efficacious options for increasing school safety and limiting all forms of bullying. In this chapter we discuss important facts about bullying and its effects on students, the history of bullying pre- vention and legislation efforts, methods to assess bullying victimization, and strategies for prevention and interven- tion. We also review the research on the effectiveness of many marketed bullying prevention programs so that school psychologists can be critical consumers in selecting a program for their school. However, more work needs to be done to improve bullying prevention efforts. What Is and Is Not Bullying Bullying can involve direct physical and verbal victim- ization; relational victimization, which involves beha- viors designed to harm a person’s relationships (e.g., spreading rumors or telling lies; Crick & Bigbee, 1998); and behaviors consistent with sexual harassment (Felix & McMahon, 2007). Although there are many defini- tions of bullying (Rigby, 2004), the most widely used definition describes bullying as aggressive behavior involving the intentional infliction of harm on another person in a relationship characterized by an imbalance of power (Olweus, 1994). Bullying is different than two children of equal strength engaging in a fight, or friends teasing each other, even though these experiences may also cause problems. When considered in this way, bullying is a subtype of more pervasive peer aggression, a subtype that can have significant negative developmental effects on the victim and the perpetrator because of its chronic nature. History of Bullying Legislation and Prevention Efforts Although bullying is an age-old phenomenon, systematic attention was not paid to preventing it until the 1970s. Efforts began in Norway, following highly publicized suicides of students who were chronically bullied. In response, Dan Olweus developed and evaluated a universal-level prevention program that was used throughout Scandinavia (Olweus, 1994). Similarly, in response to U.S. school shooting tragedies, educators and policy makers began to take action. Limber and Small (2003), in their review of state 1279