Bullying: A Case for Early Intervention

Abstract

While early intervention into bullying is identified as part of national crime prevention strategies in countries such as Australia, there is a relative paucity of bullying research in early childhood education in comparison to bullying research conducted in the formal school setting. There is little evidence also of usage by early childhood teachers of the binary categories of bully and victim with clear criteria for category membership to denote those individuals who threaten social order. This paper reports on a beginning study of bullying with early childhood teachers and children in three centres catering for children birth to 5 years in Brisbane, Australia. The emerging study examines the pedagogical practices employed by early childhood teachers to address the bullying phenomenon within an early intervention imperative and seeks to generate research-based insight into the nature of bullying and the strategies used to address and reduce bullying in early childhood education.