Brian Altonen, MPH, MS

Mapping childhood aggressive behavior will probably not resolve the problem or help define its exact cause(s).  

But it may provide us with insights into the social situations or environments that help lead to this growing problem, and/or provide us with the knowledge needed to better understand these events as possible personal behavior induced events.

The relationships between grade level and age, gender, ethnicity, family poverty history, school-derived cultural definitions about certain people, and the nature of ongoing staff-student relationships help shed some light into the social aspects of this problem.

We once believed that the causes for this behavior were very much related to mostly poverty, and crime and gang-related activities.  More recent cases suggest that these social behaviors can occur independent of such causes, tending to be individually derived rather than socially derived.  

 Bullies themselves can be broken down into different groups (http://bullying.about.com/od/Bullies/a/6-Common-Types-Of-Bullies.htm ).

Chances are, many GIS interpretations of bullying and other activities related to violence (spouse or child abuse, drug activity, certain crime events) may in fact show it is not as predictable through spatial analyses as we would like.  However, with spatial analyses we can still see certain large area features being shared by these cases (i.e. mostly within urban settings, or certain SES  and poverty settings). 

For more on this topic . . . . see

Bullying Statistics:

http://nobullying.com/bullying-statistics-2014/

http://www.a4kclub.org/get-the-facts/bullying-statistics

Signs of bullying at school:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11654053.htm

National Association of Nursing opinion on this subject:  http://www.nasn.org/PolicyAdvocacy/PositionPapersandReports/NASNPositionStatementsFullView/tabid/462/ArticleId/638/Bullying-Prevention-in-Schools-Adopted-January-2014

American Psychological Association stance:  http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11654053.htm

Graphic depiction, caught on tape:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/22/high-school-bullying-video_n_4644787.html

Who is in fact liable?  http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/03/if_schools_are_liable_for_bullying_parents_can_be_too_editorial.html