In February 2026, a jury in Plano, Texas, returned a verdict in a bullying case involving an adult woman, Summer Smith, and a teenager, Asher Vann. The court ordered Smith and her attorney to pay Vann nearly $3.2 million for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Ironically, Vann had been accused of bullying in the original matter.
The case arose from an incident five years earlier. In 2021, Vann hosted a sleepover with four friends to celebrate his 14th birthday. The boys played a prank: after one fell asleep, another urinated into a bottle of Gatorade, and the group then woke him and urged him to take a sip. One of the boys filmed his reaction. (Vann was present but not alleged to have initiated the prank or directly urged the victim to drink.) It was quintessentially stupid teenage behavior—the kind that, in an earlier era, produced the “Jackass” MTV celebrities.
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Two weeks after the sleepover, the pranked boy—Smith’s son—argued with the boy who had filmed him, who then circulated the video among classmates. When Smith learned of it, she launched a public campaign against Vann, sharing the video on social media and accusing him of racially motivated abuse against her son. The story went viral. Protesters gathered outside Vann’s home and threw rocks through the windows. The school suspended him for “cyberbullying,” even though he had not filmed or shared the video. Years of death threats and social ostracism followed. (Why Smith did not blame the boy who filmed and dispersed the video is not entirely clear; apparently, she focused on Vann as the host of the party.)
Smith’s accusations against Vann lacked foundation. Neither school officials nor police investigators found evidence that the prank was racially motivated. Smith’s own son told administrators that he was “not all that upset” by it and later apologized to Vann for the uproar his mother had caused. A racially diverse jury ultimately rejected her public crusade.
The Plano case exemplifies the failures of the “anti-bullying” movement, which has expanded rapidly over the past quarter century. What began as a commendable effort to protect vulnerable young people has stretched the definition of bullying beyond coherence, undermined the resilience of young people, and encouraged litigation and public shaming—all while distracting from cases involving genuine abuse.
The concept of the bully is familiar in popular culture, appearing in many forms. It includes classic intimidators like Back to the Future’s Biff Tannen, petty mean girls like Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie, and cruel, entitled brats like Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter. Broadly speaking, a bully is someone who uses status or power to intimidate, humiliate, or coerce someone weaker.
Bullies aren’t necessarily evil—Draco is no Voldemort—but they can be criminals and, at the very least, usually jerks. They are also a persistent feature of life. As early as 1897, the scientific literature described bullying behavior as part of the childhood experience, a view that remained largely unchallenged for generations.
The anti-bullying movement is founded on the work of Norway-based academic psychologist Dan Olweus. He cast bullying as a human-rights violation and defined it as involving intentional harm, repeated (or potentially repeated) behavior, and, most important, a power imbalance between parties. In this framing, bullying becomes, in fact, evil.
Olweus theorized that bullying could be eradicated. What would it take? An unflinching refusal to tolerate the behavior, along with a changed society, one in which every child felt included and safe. He developed a resource-intensive, whole-school program requiring participation from students, staff, parents, and the broader community. The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program aimed to reshape children’s environments to reduce power imbalances and promote equity and inclusion among students.
The 1999 Columbine High School massacre effectively launched the anti-bullying movement in the United States. In videos discovered posthumously, the two perpetrators claimed to have been motivated, in part, by being bullied. Their statements aroused concerns that bullying could produce violent offenders and helped drive widespread support for Olweus’s “zero tolerance” approach and his prevention program. But from an anti-bullying perspective, Columbine presented a contradiction: those claiming to be victims were simultaneously capable of violent behavior themselves.
Between 1999 and 2015, every state and Washington, D.C., enacted some form of anti-bullying legislation. Olweus himself lobbied for some of these laws, which made schools legally responsible for protecting all children from broadly defined bullying—a goal that had never proved remotely achievable. Today, nearly all states require schools to adopt anti-bullying policies, establish reporting and investigation procedures, and implement or encourage Olweus-style prevention programming.
These widespread mandates spawned a lucrative anti-bullying industry. Consultants, law firms, curriculum developers, mental-health organizations, and nonprofits proliferated to manage liability and capture public funding. The nonprofit National Bullying Prevention Center’s financial statements from the past decade show that the organization received an average of nearly $2.3 million yearly in government grants. Lawsuit settlements now reach into the millions. Some organizations sell merchandise—like “Stand Up to Bullying” T-shirts and “Pride & Pronouns” pins—and list extensive corporate and celebrity endorsements.
Despite vast resources and attention, the anti-bullying movement has never come close to delivering on its promises. Bullying persists, and empirical evidence that these approaches can even meaningfully reduce it is mixed, at best.
From the beginning, anti-bullying efforts have shown scant results. A large-scale study of Olweus’s program in Norway between 1983 to 1985 failed to find that it erased bullying—it came nowhere close. Reported incidents declined, however, which was enough to attract international attention, though the underlying measurements were loose, counting behavior that occurred as infrequently as “now and then.”
More recent studies find that even the most highly regarded, resource-intensive programs reduce student-reported bullying by only 15 percent to 20 percent. Most studies find no benefit—or, worse, counterproductive effects. One meta-analysis published in School Psychology Review found null or harmful outcomes in 86 percent of programs—a failure rate of nearly nine out of ten. A 2013 study likewise found that students at schools with anti-bullying programs were more likely to report victimization than those at schools without them.
Federal survey data paint a similar picture. In 2021–22, 19 percent of students reported being bullied at school, compared with a nearly identical 22 percent in 2013. The same data show that in the 2021–22 school year, 100 percent of students reported experiencing, witnessing, or being aware of bullying. “The extent to which rates of bullying have changed in recent years is unclear,” a major National Academies of Sciences report concedes. How useful is a concept so broad that it produces a statistic of 100 percent?
In fact, the movement’s damaging effects stem in part from its expanding definition. Bullying once connoted real abuse or threats, often violent. But Olweus’s model has evolved into one that can encompass almost anything that upsets someone. Several states now define bullying to include any gesture or word that makes a student uncomfortable—insults, competition, even eye-rolling. In Texas, where Vann was initially suspended, one incident of such alleged bullying can trigger a school response.
This concept creep, paired with zero-tolerance policies, has created the impression that even a perceived slight can be as damaging as something far more serious, like physical assault. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in The Coddling of the American Mind, call this the “Untruth of Fragility”—the idea that nearly any form of adversity or discomfort is harmful to one’s well-being. The anti-bullying regime takes this principle literally. Traditional wisdom told children: sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. “Now,” says school psychologist Izzy Kalman, who worked in Israeli and New York City schools for decades, “we teach kids that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can scar me forever—or even kill me.”
“Several states now define bullying to include any gesture or word that makes a student uncomfortable—insults, competition, even eye-rolling. ”
Promising young people constant emotional comfort and intervention can foster a helpless, victim-oriented mindset. “The more upset a child appears,” says Kalman, “the harder adults fight on their behalf.” But rather than resolving conflict, involvement by teachers, administrators, or parents often escalates it. “If I tell on you, and you get punished because of me, are you going to like me more?” Kalman asks. “Of course not. You will want to get back at me, so you are likely to do something even worse next time.” Research bears this out. A study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that bullied students who reported incidents to school staff—the preferred anti-bullying response—had higher odds of continued victimization than those who did not.
Raising students to rely on authority figures does little to develop independent adults capable of resolving conflicts. Such students are more likely to carry these expectations into adulthood, where they may demand that universities, employers, and governments shield them from disagreeable opinions and hurt feelings. The Pew Research Center finds that 66 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Americans—those who’ve grown up knowing such pervasive safetyism—think that “government should do more to solve problems,” a higher rate than for any other age group. Support for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply among young adults in recent years.
Anti-bullying laws effectively require schools to guarantee that no student is ever made upset. It’s an impossible standard and one that distorts the behavior of both schools and families. A Washington Post analysis found that bullying-related lawsuits proliferated between 2016 and 2023. Settlements are rising, reaching a record $27 million in 2024, with a $100 million case in Chicago still pending. Schools must spend heavily on compliance, documentation, training, reporting systems, and investigations, all to implement programs that haven’t made children any safer.
Ideally, legal liability ensures that schools keep students physically safe. But it also creates a perverse incentive to deny real problems when they arise. After the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, reports emerged that the shooter had allegedly been bullied in high school; his former school district issued a statement disputing the claims. Those denials may have been accurate, but reviews of prior mass shootings have noted cases in which administrators sought to hide incriminating information about student violence. The rise in anti-bullying litigation could have a chilling effect on threat assessments involving genuinely dangerous behavior.
The anti-bullying movement reaches its most damaging irrationality when it treats all forms of bullying as equally problematic. This approach reliably produces two destructive outcomes: disproportionate punishment for minor offenses and lax enforcement against serious ones. Asher Vann’s multiyear ostracism exemplifies the first; the failure to act against a repeatedly violent student illustrates the second.
“Just about everyone gets treated badly on occasion,” says Izzy Kalman. “The true victims of bullying—the ones who are suffering and desperately want help—are those who are incessantly harassed. The research rarely examines programs’ effects on them.”
A mother I spoke with, Samie Hardman, described how the former principal of her 12-year-old son Drayke’s school in Utah was reluctant to remove from class a boy who had repeatedly assaulted him and other students. The principal, who later stepped down, also allegedly denied a group of 12 students’ request to address the repeat offender. The reason: the principal did not want to “bully” the boy through exclusion, even after Drayke had taken his own life following the harassment. “The principal made a choice,” Hardman said. “She wanted to be a buddy to the one student, not an authority willing to protect the 12 others.”
Anti-bullying ideology not only recasts genuinely dangerous aggressors as potentially fragile victims; it also assumes that they are rational actors who can be persuaded to change. But that assumption often fails. Drayke’s attacker, Hardman said, was ultimately removed only after another family pressed criminal charges. None of the school’s inclusive efforts stopped the violence.
This misdiagnosis extends beyond individual cases. Many advocates still view school shooters primarily through the lens of victimization, just as they did after Columbine. In most cases, shooters see themselves in this way. They may have experienced rejection, humiliation, or even bullying, but they are rarely passive victims who suddenly snap. Before their attacks, most had exhibited threatening, aggressive, or otherwise worrisome behaviors that were observable to others. Feelings of victimization do not preclude or justify violence; nor do they negate personal agency.
In this context, what is labeled “bullying” may sometimes reflect appropriate peer responses to antisocial behavior, rather than unprovoked cruelty. Should students be considered bullies for avoiding a peer who brings a knife to school? Should they refrain from condemning a classmate who posts violent threats or disturbing images online, for fear of being accused of cyberbullying? Such responses are essential for maintaining safety and order and for teaching young people how to navigate similar situations in adulthood.
The distinction that emerges is straightforward but crucial. Objective harm warrants serious attention and firm discipline; it causes damage regardless of the target’s interpretation. Subjective harm, by contrast, depends on perception and reaction. Schools cannot credibly prohibit serious bullying if they blur this line.
To make real progress in reducing bullying and making schools safer, we need to restore a clear distinction between objectively harmful conduct and subjective feelings of offense. The former should be addressed through school discipline and, when necessary, law enforcement; the latter calls for personal growth. States and schools should recalibrate accordingly.
The false dichotomy of bully and victim, meanwhile, must be abandoned. A renewed emphasis on teaching and enforcing behavioral expectations, basic order, and shared social norms is essential. “Instead of teaching students not to be bullies, we should be teaching students not to think like victims,” says Kalman, who heads the Kalman Bullying Institute and is the lead author of the Be Strong Resilience Program for young people. He has been making these arguments against the anti-bullying movement for decades, often as a lone voice. Kalman’s many warnings that the anti-bullying movement would produce unintended consequences—retaliation, diminished resilience, and more litigation—have proved prescient.
An effective framework for instruction would draw on commonsense principles like the Golden Rule, too often dismissed as simplistic—but still foundational. Many students have never absorbed this basic ethic. For a quarter century, the anti-bullying movement has often sent the opposite message: that perceived harm, rather than objective conduct, should govern judgment and response.
There is no question that young people today face new challenges in the digital world, where large-scale psychological harassment is possible as never before. But that reality makes reform more urgent, not less. The current approach too often escalates conflicts rather than resolving them. No one knows that better than Asher Vann, who could be forgiven for never joking—or letting his guard down with friends—again.
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