Proposal

Working Title: Bullying Prevention Tips and Tricks

       For my capstone project I wanted to bring feminism into some of the Dunkirk school districts through the local Boys and Girls Club. Bullying among children has become very common and sadly more violent and hurtful in contemporary times. According to www.stopbullying.gov, 30% of youth admit to bullying others, 70.6% admit to seeing bullying in their schools, and when bystanders intervene- within 10 seconds the bullying ends 57% of the time. These statistics were obtained from students in grades 6-12, for my own research I want to study students from ages 5-12. I want to focus my research and activism with younger children because I want to prevent bullying behaviors or situations before they occur. I think if the students learn more about bullying and the outcomes. This can promote that when those students are older they can stop bullying from happening and/or not engage in bullying behaviors themselves.

       I plan recruiting my subjects at the Boys and Girls club by asking if any of the children want to participate in a study. If they show interest I will give the student a parental consent form for their parent or guardian to fill out. The consent form will give full disclosure and information about the study and research I will be collecting. I will conduct a pre and post-test to use the qualitative data and code it for bullying behaviors for give my statistical results. After I conduct the pre-test I will be educating the subjects about bullying for 30 minutes two times a week. After a month of various group work and bully education I will then conduct a post-test to see if there are any differences from the pre-test.

       I believe that teaching the children about bullying prevention is feminist activism because I am working towards educating people about accepting others even when they are different from who you are. It’s not uncommon to hear about the people who are usually targeted for bullying are the people who live outside of the binary boxes; which are able bodied, heterosexual, extremely masculine males or extremely feminine females. I think teaching children about bullying in a feminist lens will hold the students responsible to a higher standard of knowledge about all the different kinds of people in the world that the students may not have been exposed to before.

Here’s a study I will be using towards my research:

Shetgiri, R., Lin, H., & Flores, G. (2013). Trends in Risk and Protective Factors for Child Bullying Perpetration in the United States. Child Psychiatry And Human Development, 44(1), 89-104.