Associations Between Overweight and Obesity With Bullying Behaviors in School-Aged Children

The authors of “Associations Between Overweight and Obesity With Bullying Behaviors in School-Aged Children” apparently took great care establishing the correlative aspects of obesity and adolescent expressions of power and ‘bullying.’ Having read the article, I’ve found many criticisms of the findings to be misguided and presumptuous.

I take issue with Dr. Janssen’s condescending reply to Professor Hannan’s input when he criticizes her for focusing on the negative potential of the study’s media coverage, shortly before he celebrates “achieving” a goal of drawing attention to body-size as an issue in anti- bullying programs. Since it was a goal, one must assume that the authors believe that public attention on the correlation between body-size and bullying will have positive outcomes. Pandering to publicity occasions both positive outcomes of awareness, and the reification of stereotypes and prejudices, in which academic science has historically played a regrettable supporting role.

Focused strictly on the findings and discussion in the article, I found one rather disturbingly ‘unscientific’ implication that could contribute to the “anti-fat hysteria” that Professor Hannan condemns. Throughout the article, the weight of responsibility for the negative social environment for the obese is placed squarely on the shoulders of the victims: "Of equal importance are the negative social and psychological ramifications of childhood obesity (pg. 1187).” The negative “ramifications” are a product of prejudicial social environments, not of obesity. These prejudicial social environments also effect children of other ethnicities, creeds, socio-economic statuses, dress, levels of athletic ability and scholastic achievement – a seemingly infinite number of additional categories in which adolescents justify their abuse of others. Since there is no known connection between adiposity and biological causes of aggression, it is reasonable to surmise that the problem is, and always has been, social-environmental.

The attempts at linguistic neutrality – "psychological outcomes" and "ramifications" – don't mitigate the bias inherent here (although the inclusion of 'unmarried women' as an "outcome" of "social problems" in line with lower income and education levels is laughably antiquated). The implication of the study is clear: the obese and ‘pre-obese’ need treatment in order to lessen the negative social behaviour the authors recognize obese children as victims of, and subsequently exhibit as one result of their initial victimizations.

The authors imply that the increased health and social risks obligate the 'afflicted' to reform themselves so they won't be subject to discrimination. In Canadian social history we've endeavored to move away from 'assimilationist' answers for prejudice against diversity, and focused -- with limited success I grant you -- on reforming prejudicial attitudes. It would seem more 'just' to address prejudicial impulses or norms, rather than counseling obese children or policing schoolyards.

It would be extremely challenging to quantify the amount of bullying in proportion to the amount of extra pounds a child has. First, body weight is in large measure determined by a persons height, so in obesity studies (including our study) adiposity status is normally determined by the body mass index (BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) rather than body weight alone. Second, BMI changes substantially during the growing years as a natural process of maturation. Thus, for a given BMI level younger children are less obese compared to older children. To take this into consideration, in our study children were classified as normal weight, overweight, or obese based on standardized international BMI values that are age and gender specific.

In response to the question "Is the amount of bullying exponential?". For many of the bullying measures we saw a graded or dose-response relationship with adiposity level. That is, the likelihood of the bullying behaviors increased when moving from the normal weight to overweight group, with a further increase when moving from the overweight to obese group. The reader is referred to Tables 3-5.

In response to the last question "Is nationality a contributing factor?". There are differences in obesity and bullying prevalence rates in different countries. Further, within a given country children may be bullied specifically because of their race or ethnicity. We did not have race/ethnicity data on our subjects, and are thus uncertain if the relationship between obesity and bullying is influenced by these demographic variables.

Ms. Hannan’s letter was suitably titled “Misdrawn Conclusions” as she made a number of incorrect conclusions from our paper. We believe that her conclusions were based solely on the media coverage that surrounded the publication of our paper, and were not drawn from the paper itself. We encourage Ms. Hannan and those who have read her letter to review our published paper in detail.

We would like to clarify that at no point in our paper did we indicate that obesity is the only cause of bullying. Clearly, there are a number of other factors that contribute to bullying (e.g., race, religion, hair color, material wealth, school performance, etc.), and as indicated in Table 1 of our paper, a large percentage of normal weight adolescents are also bullied. We merely tried to highlight that overweight and obese adolescents are more likely to be the victims and perpetrators of bullying compared to those with a normal body weight. Again, this does not imply that all obese children are bullied and that all lean children are not. As body weight issues are not specifically addressed in most anti-bullying programs, our goal was to draw attention to this important issue. Indeed, given the widespread media coverage of our article, we achieved that goal. We hope that anti-bullying programs will be modified in the future to take into account the findings of our paper. We also hope that our findings provide additional evidence of the need to prevent and treat obesity in youth, and the importance of helping overweight and obese youth and their peers recognize and adjust to obesity-related social issues.

Is there a way to quantify the amount of bullying in proportion to the amount of extra pounds a healthy child shouldn't have. Is there a diagram? Is the amount of bullying exponential (like the Richter scale for example) Is the nationality a contributing factor?

Thank you.

Your article seems to indicate that it's right and prudent to solve the problem of fat kids being bullied by having teachers and schools (and parents and doctors) blame the fat kids for supposedly bringing this on themselves by being fat. Let me ask you this, if every fat kid in America woke up tomorrow thin, would bullying cease?

You are steering opinion by taking two separate issues and melding them.

1. Some kids are fat. Yes, this is a problem, as more children are sedentary and eat an unbalanced diet. Schools should address these issues by teaching joy in movement during what should be mandatory daily physical eduation. Schools should also teach good nutrition and back it up by serving healthy foods and eliminating empty-calorie choices in the cafeteria.

2. Bullying should not be tolerated in any way, shape, or form. Your article suggests that to solve bullying (and residual bullying), kids should simply lose weight- and problem solved. It's not as simple as that. The young men who perpetrated the horrific attack at Columbine High School were NOT FAT. They were victimized by bullies for YEARS, and finally resorted to becoming bullies themselves, in a huge way. The fact is, if there were no fat kids, bullies would target smart kids, slow kids, poor kids, kids with big ears, Jewish kids, Hindu kids, brown kids, black kids...being thin is no armor against bullies.

So, you have two entirely separate issues you've merged into one which has been picked up by the press and is yet more ammunition for the anti-fat hysteria. My daughter drew the following correlation after reading about your research in the newspaper this morning, "It would be like being bullied for being Jewish and having my teachers tell me the solution would be for me to convert to Christianity."

When will someone's "research" show that ALL CHILDREN should be physically active and eat a balanced diet? When will someone's "research" show that bullies need to be punished HARD so they get that bullying is completely unacceptable and won't be tolerated?