User:Viriditas/Trump effect on school bullying

Trump at a rally in 2016

The Trump effect is an alleged increase in school bullying in the US caused by the rhetoric Donald Trump used during his 2016 presidential campaign. A survey of teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed that Trump's language was being used by students in classroom settings, having the effect of increasing bullying, especially against youth of color. This survey has been criticized for relying largely on anecdotal evidence, as has the SPLC's method of collecting the survey's data.

Original survey

On April 13, 2016, the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published a report called "The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation's Schools". Based on a survey of 2000 teachers from SPLC's Teaching Tolerance program, the report found that the 2016 presidential election was stirring up racial tensions in American schools. Over half of the respondents reported an increase in uncivil political discourse in their classrooms and over a third observed an increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment among students. Teachers reporting racially-motivated bullying incidents connected them to Trump's campaign rhetoric. The SPLC report concluded that children's behavior was being influenced by the divisive rhetoric of the 2016 election and named the rise in bullying the "Trump Effect".

National Public Radio NPR noted that the survey was largely anecdotal and did not comprise a representative sample of the nation's teachers. Bullying expert Dorothy Espelage noted that with the SPLC survey, "the data are not there to support the statement from a scientific-evidence-based perspective". The Cyberbullying Research Center concurred with her assessment, noting that the survey was "not precise enough to conclude one way or another if the 'Trump Effect' is impacting bullying experiences at school".

Response

After the publication of the SPLC report, media outlets reported on the Trump effect and searched for evidence that it existed. In a report for Sky News, teachers were interviewed who observed that students had been demonstrating less tolerance for one another. Individual examples included children shouting "Trump" at Hispanic children and joking about deportation, nicknaming an Indian student "Isis", and using Trump campaign slogans as taunts. Epilepsy Foundation boardmember Tony Coelho said that rates of school bullying could be increasing, stating that "All of a sudden we have a national figure, who is bullying, who is mocking, who is doing all these things." Teaching Tolerance director Maureen Costello monitors the concerns of teachers and expressed worry at the Trump effect, saying that she found that the trend has continued since the results of the survey were published in April. Political strategist Bruce Haynes claimed that Trump was responsible for a rhetoric around immigration that has been "more angry and even raunchy" than in past races. Though Haynes said that he was not surprised "that it has spilled over into classrooms in less than positive ways," he considers the report to be an unscientific assemblage of anecdotal stories.

The National Education Association (NEA) launched a campaign to inform people of "the harmful effects of Donald Trump's inflammatory rhetoric on America's schoolchildren." NEA president Lily Eskelsen García said that "The rise in vitriolic speech in classrooms and the anxiety created by Donald Trump" illustrated the need for anti-bullying initiatives. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said of Trump that he has "created an environment of scapegoating and demonizing. It is influencing children and it is influencing behavior in schools."

In late 2016, subsequent to the presidential election, the SPLC published several updates to its initial report, documenting numerous continued incidents of racial, ethnic, and anti-immigrant harassment and intimidation after the election. A report for investigative journalism website ProPublica expressed the opinion that the post-election upsurge in hate crimes reported by the SPLC was a real phenomenon, and quoted reports from the FBI and from California authorities that appeared to support it. But this ProPublica report also lamented the relative lack of hard data from law enforcement to allow rigorous quantitative evaluation of the phenomenon, and quoted FBI director James Comey's comment that “We need to do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crimes to fully understand what is happening in our communities and how to stop it”. On February 10, 2017, the SPLC published another update on post-election bias incidents, which included an announcement of a new collaboration with ProPublica to improve documentation and verification. ProPublica's own page for the collaboration, known as Documenting Hate, cites over 90 organizational participants, including four schools of journalism, and references the SPLC in explaining why such a project is needed.

The peer-reviewed Mid-Atlantic Education Review has published a special issue on "Public Education in the Age of Trump", which includes an article by Jason P. Murphy that cites the December 16, 2016 update to the SPLC report and expands upon its implications. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, David R. Williams and Morgan M. Medlock cite the original SPLC report and its November 29, 2016 update, and place the phenomena reported by the SPLC in the context of prior research on the effects of public policy on mental and physical health.

As a campaign issue

During the second presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said that the harshness of Trump's words was affecting children, saying "Teachers and parents call it the 'Trump effect'. Bullying is up. A lot of people are feeling uneasy, a lot of kids are expressing their concerns." Politifact rated Clinton's claim as "mostly true", in part citing the SPLC survey.