Book Review: Confronting school bullying: Kids, culture, and the making of a social problem

• Date: 01 September 2015
• Author: Erin Denton
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567715578269
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

The Emergence of EU Criminal Law is a timely edition to the scholarship on law in the digital

age and will prove useful to students and legal practitioners. While it may lie outside the scope of

the current work, I look forward to future empirical analysis on the effects of these laws on crim-

inal apprehension and prosecution. As the laws discussed in the book are still nascent, many only

coming into play a couple of years after the turn of the century or later, research has not fleshed out

the impact of the laws on law enforcement practice and outcomes. As a decade has now passed

from many of these laws, others can use this work to sculpt research efforts in this area. Further,

it would be interesting to know the impact of harmonization of European law and if, in fact,

harmonization has improved prosecution efforts. Surely, the work by Summers and her colleagues

will inform a new generation of legal scholars and direct academic work for years to come.

Cohen, J. W., & Brooks, R. A. (2014).

Confronting school bullying: Kids, culture, and the making of a social problem. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

251 pp. $58.50, ISBN 978-1-62637-152-1.

Reviewed by: Erin Denton, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

DOI: 10.1177/1057567715578269

Cohen and Brooks provide a succinct description of the evolution of the social construction of

bullying, doing so primarily through their analysis of media treatments of turning point cases of

bullying in the United States and Canada. Structured to depict the precise movements of concepts

and constructions of bullying during childhood and adolescence, this book offers a germane account

of how and why categorizations and classifications of bullying have evolved over the past few

decades.

Although less a criminological treatment than an analysis of social movements and the media,

this book offers an economical treatment of how popular opinion of bullying has been shaped and

defined by media representations. Although there remains a need for analyzing whether or not the

evolution is rooted in abstract social constructions rather than changes in human behavior rooted in

modernity and technological advances that promote anonymity (e.g., the Internet), the relevancy of

this book is established in Cohen and Brooks’s ability to connect tangible current events with social,

political, and legal responses to bullying.

The book is chronologically constructed to portray the development of concepts of bullying from

common place normal behavior to issues within particular individuals to a wider social context born

from specific social, political, and cultural contexts. The book begins with an introduction to news

media’s apt connection between bullying and retaliatory violence and bullying and youth suicide.

Chapter 2 explores the origins of constructions of school bullying as problems within and between

individuals that expanded to include multitudes of individuals who experienced and engaged in bul-

lying. Chapters 3 and 4 delve into the origins of academic and media’s acknowledgment of the role

of the social context and social condition in regard to school bullying. With Chapter 3, Cohen and

Brooks discuss the construction of school bullying as a public health issue and eventual epidemic.

Chapter 4 furthers the explorations of Chapter 3 by highlighting how the concept of bullying as

a public health issue perpetuated the framing of bullying as familial, institutional, and culture fail-

ures. As such, Chapters 3 and 4 frame the specific events and social/political/legal responses that

pushed bullying from a micro-level phenomenon to that which is fundamentally impacted by macro-

structures. Chapters 5 and 6 delve into specific North American discourses and contextualization

that pigeonhole bullying into issues of gender, sexuality, and social control. These chapters are

284 International Criminal Justice Review 25(3)