During and immediately after the 2016 presidential campaign, numerous reports emerged of an uptick in bullying behavior. As the mother of a bullied elementary school student told CBS News just after the vote: "The man that won the election has been modeling that it's OK to bully people ... and now children think it's OK to be mean too."
Definitively proving such a dynamic is difficult, but a new study of Virginia schools provides the most compelling evidence yet that the 2016 campaign has coarsened kids' behavior. It reports that, in the spring of 2017, middle school students were 18 percent more likely to report being bullied if they lived in areas where voters supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
In previous surveys, there were no significant differences in bullying rates between Democratic- and Republican-leaning communities.
[For more on this story by TOM JACOBS, go to https://psmag.com/education/sc...that-supported-trump]
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