On the other hand, it's a great time to be a lawyer. There is so much opportunity to make a good living, thanks to anti-bullying laws. Is it any wonder that laws are made by lawyers? (Actually, it's also a good time for bullying consultants to make a living, too, thanks to anti-bullying laws. Which is why the anti-bullying consultants lobby for anti-bullying laws! And the schools, not the consultants, get sued when their programs don't work. I, too, am benefitting–my phone has never been so busy–though I would personally rather do away with these laws.)

School principals, in particular, are going nuts today dealing with bullying issues. Never have hostilities been higher. When the school administration gets involved apprehending, investigating, interrogating and judging bullies, kids get angrier at each other and the alleged bullies get angry at the school administration. The parents of the kids get angrier at each other. Whichever set of parents feels the administration is unfair to them gets angry at the administration, goes complaining to the school district, and sometimes hires lawyers to sue the school or district. Rather than bringing peace to schools, anti-bullying laws are turning them into war zones. Anti-bullying laws are a Catch 22. They require schools to eliminate bullying by treating it like a crime, but the very attempt to enforce the laws creates an intensification of the bullying problem.

It has amazed me for over a decade that my own colleagues, practitioners of the psychological sciences, are eager to treat bullying like a crime. Why do they believe that lawyers have the solution to interpersonal problems? If you are having difficulty getting along with your spouse and you discover that your spouse went for help to a lawyer, do you think, "Thank God! Things are going to start getting better now!" When your spouse goes to a lawyer, that's when the war really begins! The role of lawyers is to help you fight better against the other side. But somehow they expect lawyers to be able to bring peace to schools.

Both the American Psychological Association and the National Association of School Psychologists have issued research-based position papers warning against punitive policies for discipline, explaining the myriad ways in which they cause more harm than good. Yet both these organizations advocate for anti-bullying laws, which require bullies to be punished and schools to be punished if they don't make the bullying stop.

Why have we been creating these irrational policies about bullying? It's because we panicked, and when we panic, logic goes down the drain. We panicked about Columbine, the first major event that initiated our war against bullies, and more recently we've been panicking about the child suicides committed by victims of bullying.

To solve problems, we need to have rational policies. Therefore, as an alternative to the hysteria-driven counterproductive school anti-bullying policies, I am offering a rational policy. I know that many of you, especially parents, will object to this policy because you want to see the crap punished out of your kids' bullies, but I guarantee you that this policy is to your benefit, too. What good is a policy that will fail to solve your children's problems and increase hostility towards you and your children?

[If your child is suffering from being bullied, your child deserves to be taught how to solve the problem. A good place to start is by having him/her read my free Online manual, How to Stop Being Teased and Bullied Without Really Trying: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/?q=node/154  If you are skeptical, you may want to read the following: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-bully-witch-hunt/200907/free-website-manual-saves-life-bullying-victim]

I don't actually expect schools to run out and adopt this policy, as much as they would like to. But perhaps if enough of us have the courage to support such a policy and present it to our unions and professional associations, we will build steam and start reversing the destructive path we are currently zooming down.

A Rational, Moral School Bullying Policy

There is nothing our school would like better than to create an environment in which all students are always nice to each other. It would make life more pleasant not only for students, who are the raison d'être of our school, but for our school staff as well. We would greatly prefer spending our time educating students than playing bully police.

Unfortunately, such a goal is impossible. We have heard of only one place in which everyone is always nice to each other. That place is called Heaven.

Statistics have shown that despite the terror regarding school bullying that has gripped the modern world, schools are the safest place for children. There is more bullying going on in the workplace. In fact, some of our school staff complain of being bullied by other staff members and we haven't figured out how to make it stop. The most frequent and serious bullying happens right at home. About 50% of us have gotten divorced because we couldn't get our spouses to stop bullying us. Our own few kids at home bully each other on a daily basis and no matter how hard we try to stop them, they keep on doing it.

Furthermore, the bullying research has shown that the most intensive anti-bullying programs rarely do more than produce a minor reduction in bullying and are more likely to lead to an increase in bullying. Prof. Dan Olweus, who created the psychological field of bullying and spawned the infectious idea that schools are responsible for the bullying that goes on between students, has not succeeded in solving the bullying problem. His extremely intensive and time-consuming program, which has earned the reputation as the "gold standard," rests on the laurels of studies conducted three decades ago in Scandinavia, showing that after two years of implementation bullying was reduced by only 50%. Studies of his program in our country have failed to replicate the Scandinavian results and have found that it often results in an increase in bullying. How are we to be held responsible for making schools bully-free when the gold standard program fails to do it?

If you can show us a guaranteed approach to providing your children with a bully-free environment, we will immediately implement it. If you prefer to sue us, we will voluntarily step down from our positions and let you run the school.

This said, we are happy to inform you that our school is, indeed, determined to do all in its power to make your child as free from bullying as possible. We will do our best to accomplish this goal in the most sensible and moral way.