Bullying is often dismissed as a normal part of growing up. But its impact can extend beyond the student being bullied to the student engaging in the behavior and the wider school community. Schools have a significant responsibility to respond to bullying and, just as importantly, to prevent it.
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What the Latest Data Shows
The CDC’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) offers a current look at how often high school students experience bullying.
In 2025, 22% of female students and 17% of male students reported being bullied on school property. Those rates remained essentially unchanged from 2023. While it’s encouraging that bullying did not increase, the lack of a decrease also reminds us that there is still work to do.
Educators also see the impact of electronic bullying during the school day, even when the behavior happens outside of school. In 2025, 18% of female students reported being electronically bullied, down from 21% in 2023. Among male students, the rate remained unchanged at 12%.
It’s clear that bullying remains a significant issue. Changing these numbers requires schools to look earlier at behaviors, interactions, and concerns that may emerge long before they meet the definition of bullying.
4 Common Challenges for Preventing Bullying
StopBullying.gov describes bullying as unwanted, aggressive behavior between school-aged children that is repeated and involves a real or perceived power imbalance. This definition provides important guidance for schools as they develop policies and protocols for identifying, reporting, investigating, and responding to bullying.
Preventing bullying requires schools to think beyond what happens once behavior meets that definition. Several challenges can make that difficult.
1. Waiting for Behavior to Meet the Definition
Conflict, teasing, exclusion, and other hurtful behaviors may not meet the definition of bullying, but that doesn’t mean schools should wait to respond. When meeting the definition becomes the threshold for intervention, opportunities to address harmful behavior earlier can be missed. Students shouldn’t have to wait until a pattern develops before receiving support.
2. Perceptions of Bullying
Everyone brings their own perceptions of bullying to the conversation, often without realizing it. Some adults may see certain behaviors as a normal part of growing up. Others may believe students are too quick to label negative interactions as bullying. Those beliefs can shape how a concern is received and how seriously it is taken.
3. Relying Solely on Reports
Anonymous reporting provides students, staff, families, and community members with an important way to share concerns, but schools cannot depend on reports alone to identify bullying. Adults throughout the school may notice changes or concerning interactions long before a student makes a report.
4. Adults Are Examples of Behavior
Bullying is often treated as a problem among children and adolescents, but students are constantly watching how adults handle disagreement, frustration, and conflict. Modeling the respectful behavior we expect from students is part of creating a culture that prevents bullying.
5 Opportunities to Improve Bullying Prevention
Preventing bullying can feel overwhelming, but schools have opportunities to intervene long before a situation reaches a crisis point. Many of those opportunities are already embedded throughout the school day.
1. Create a Culture of Belonging
A safe and supportive school climate is an important part of bullying prevention. Clear protocols for responding to bullying matter, but so does creating an environment where students feel known, valued, and connected. Prevention happens not only through policies, but through the daily experiences students have with peers and adults.
2. Teach and Model Healthy Relationship Skills
Students need opportunities to learn empathy, conflict resolution, perspective-taking, and how to be an upstander. These skills cannot live only in a lesson or curriculum. Students need to see them modeled and reinforced in classrooms, hallways, buses, and extracurricular activities.
3. Make It Safe for Students to Speak Up
Students need multiple ways to share concerns, whether that’s talking with a trusted adult or using an anonymous reporting system. An increase in reports isn’t always a sign that bullying is increasing. It may mean students trust that when they tell someone, adults will listen and respond. Creating that trust is an important part of prevention.
4. Notice Changes in Students
There isn’t one type of student who bullies or one type of student who experiences bullying. Instead of looking for a profile, adults can pay attention to changes.
- Is a student suddenly avoiding the bus?
- Sitting somewhere different at lunch?
- Withdrawing from a friend group?
- Missing school more often?
- Becoming more aggressive or distressed?
- Using hall passes more or less frequently?
One change may not tell us much on its own, but it can become important when considered alongside what others are seeing.
5. Connect the Pieces and Act
Different adults often see different parts of a student’s experience. A bus driver may notice one interaction, a teacher another, and a counselor may see or hear something completely different. The question is whether those adults have a way to share what they are seeing. When schools can connect seemingly isolated concerns, they have a better opportunity to recognize patterns and intervene earlier.
The Role of Technology in Bullying Prevention
Technology can help schools move from reacting to bullying to recognizing concerns earlier. By giving staff a simple way to document low-level concerns and bringing information together across a student’s support system, schools can identify patterns that might otherwise remain disconnected.
Raptor StudentSafe™ helps schools recognize, document, support, and manage concerns about individual students. A teacher’s observation, a report from a bus driver, and information shared with a counselor may each seem small on their own. When those pieces can be viewed together, schools have a better opportunity to understand what is happening and respond before the situation escalates.
The goal of bullying prevention isn’t simply to respond effectively once bullying occurs. It’s to create schools where adults notice concerns earlier, students trust that speaking up will make a difference, and systems help connect the pieces before a pattern becomes a crisis.
Amy Grosso
Related Resources
Get our Campus Administrator’s Playbook for Effective Bullying Prevention to learn the reasons, best practices, systems, and data practices that turn bullying policies into daily action.
