By Andrew Blum

The core goal of this report is to explore how “democracy can provide the antidote” to political violence within the United States. In the last several years, we have seen extremist attacks, a surge in hate crimes, protests by heavily armed militias, and vicious acts of brutality by law enforcement. Violence and the threat of violence are harming communities throughout the U.S. and undermining our democracy 

At the same time, hard-won experience from communities within the United States and around the world has revealed concrete strategies that can be used to prevent, respond to, and recover from political violence. Political violence imposes real costs, but it also drives communities to create real solutions. Many of those solutions were on display during the 2020 election, which contributed to creating a largely peaceful election. The polarization and violent rhetoric on display during the election, however, also makes clear that we have work to do moving forward. Now is time to start that work. Now more than ever people understand the risk of political violence and the urgent need to invest in efforts to prevent it. Our goal must be to leverage that awareness and that energy into creating longer-term, sustainable, democracy-strengthening solutions to prevent political violence in the United States. This paper thus focuses on two basic questions: • Why should we care about political violence? What are the human and economic impacts of political violence? After the headlines cease and attention fades, what are the real costs of political violence to communities? • What can communities do about political violence? What are the community-centered strategies that address political violence? What does the evidence say about which strategies are most effective? How do we build communities that are resilient to various forms of political violence? We pose these questions primarily to funders. Democracy Fund has commissioned this research to inform the community of funders to which it belongs— funders committed to strengthening democracy within the United States 

Washington, DC: Democracy Fund, 2021. 40p.

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Bullying has long been tolerated as a rite of passage among children and adolescents. There is an implication that individuals who are bullied must have "asked for" this type of treatment, or deserved it. Sometimes, even the child who is bullied begins to internalize this idea. For many years, there has been a general acceptance and collective shrug when it comes to a child or adolescent with greater social capital or power pushing around a child perceived as subordinate. But bullying is not developmentally appropriate; it should not be considered a normal part of the typical social grouping that occurs throughout a child's life.

Although bullying behavior endures through generations, the milieu is changing. Historically, bulling has occurred at school, the physical setting in which most of childhood is centered and the primary source for peer group formation. In recent years, however, the physical setting is not the only place bullying is occurring. Technology allows for an entirely new type of digital electronic aggression, cyberbullying, which takes place through chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication.

Composition of peer groups, shifting demographics, changing societal norms, and modern technology are contextual factors that must be considered to understand and effectively react to bullying in the United States. Youth are embedded in multiple contexts and each of these contexts interacts with individual characteristics of youth in ways that either exacerbate or attenuate the association between these individual characteristics and bullying perpetration or victimization. Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, this report evaluates the state of the science on biological and psychosocial consequences of peer victimization and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease peer victimization behavior and consequences.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2016. 361p.