For 8-year-old Connor, every day is the same. While waiting for the school bus each morning, Connor counts the seconds until Jake arrives and starts to taunt him. Jake is the school bus bully, and he has taken a special "liking" to Connor. The teasing begins at the bus stop: Jake calls Connor such names as "four-eyes" and "loser." Fie trips Connor as he makes his way to his seat on the bus; then Jake takes Connor's lunch money. At each stop, children enter the bus and align into three camps: the bullies, the targets, and the watchers. The bus driver hears some of the tormenting, but does not intervene, believing that bullying is just a part of growing up. Connor's experience is not unusual. Statistics, however, vary. Christie (2005) writes that half of all children in the United States are bullied at some time in their lives; one in two is victimized on a regular basis. Thirteen percent of children in grades 6 through 10 have bullied, 11 percent have been targets, and six percent have been both bullies and targets. A 1998 Department of Education report found that approximately 25 percent of 4th-to 6th-grade students reported being bullied in the prior three months. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development identified over three million bullies between grades 6 and 10 nationwide (Nansel et al., 2001).
