Episode 009: Debra Pepler

Psychology

Dec 30

Prof. Debra Pepler studies bullying. Her direct observation of bullying in schoolyards has changed how we help children deal with aggression towards their classmates. Her work also examines dating violence and online bullying.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is Debra Pepler, Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto. Prof. Pepler is a psychologist, known for her fascinating studies of bullying. She started by looking at kids in schoolyards, but if you've ever lifted your head above the parapet on Twitter, you will understand the relevance of her research for adults today. I was delighted to interview Prof. Pepler at York University in May. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Debra, welcome to the podcast!

Debra Pepler: Thank you for having me. Lovely to be here.

Cameron: I want to talk to first but your research on schoolyard bullying. You started out in your doctoral research just looking at how kids solve problems when they play. What led you to focus on the specific topic of bullying?

Debra: May I correct you? It wasn't my doctoral research. It was about 12 years after I got my PhD. I was a professor here at York University, and I had worked at a children's mental health centre called the Child Development Institute. They were doing social skills training for aggressive children, and I was the research director evaluating that. What we found was that parents and teachers thought children improved through this training, but the classmates didn't notice a change. And that led me to a whole series of interesting questions. Was it that parents and teachers hoped upon hope that these really troubled children would be able to develop skills and regulate and manage, or was it that peers saw something different, or maybe the child just had reputations that wouldn't budge even though the child's behaviour had changed. I had done through my postdoctoral work six years of observational work, sitting in living rooms in Mississauga observing children, and it was my job interview here at York, actually, that led me to think about this because I'd seen other research where they videotaped children on playgrounds, but they didn't have any sound, and that for me wouldn't work, because when you're studying aggression, there's so much verbal back-and-forth before an episode breaks out in what you might see as physical aggression. So they had put a remote microphone on me, as I was giving my job talk, and on the way home I had this aha moment that maybe I could put these types of microphones on children and step into their worlds in a way that adults had never done before. So that's why we started the observational research. That's the mechanism that I developed. We ended up going through several iterations of microphones and finally ended up with $1000 microphones on highly aggressive children on the playground. In our videotapes we then observed bullying interaction as well as well as the nature of interaction of aggressive children and the aggression they received.

Cameron: Right. So your most highly cited publication is right on this topic. It’s the one from the Journal of Adolescence in 1999. You co-authored it with Paul O'Connell and Wendy Craig?

Debra: They were both my graduate students.

Cameron: Ah! Wonderful. The title of the article is "Peer involvement with bullying: Insights and challenges for intervention." It's an interesting title because of the focus on the peers around the bully, but also your deliberate intention here is to intervene and see what can be done to change the behaviour. It's a very engaged kind of model. So you've got these $1000 mics. Can you explain to me how you actually collected the data? Because kids don't tend to act like bullies when there's adults standing beside them.

Debra: They do, unless they forget that there's adults with them. We were quite remote on the school playground. We were often 100 m away, or 50 m away. The children were miked and just asked to go and play on the playground as they normally would.

Cameron: Didn't they change their behaviour because they were wearing a mic?

Debra: Were they on their best behaviour? I really hope not, because bullying happened once every seven or eight minutes.

Cameron: Even with the mics?

Debra: Yes, we can code for that. We can actually code quite reliably for whether a child is attending to the microphone or is attending to the camera, because they're not very sophisticated. These are Grade 1 to 6 children. If they're aware of the mic, they're going to be giving you behaviours, yelling into it or waving at it. So you can code that. And then they slipped very quickly into what we really had a sense was normal playground behaviour.

Cameron: Could you explain the word code?

Debra: Yes, I'm sorry. When you videotape, you have a running record of what's happening in the moment on the school playground. You bring the tapes back to the University and sit for hours and hours and hours, trying to understand what's happening. You look for the first, probably, five times through, at a number of tapes, at what's actually happening, and then you develop codes for that.

Cameron: When you see something repeatedly?

Debra: Yes, that's right. So is it physical aggression, is it verbal aggression, is it submission, is it asking another child to join in, what’s the emotion like on the child's face? And then you develop a manual for coding, and have to be sure that the people doing the coding agree on how to code.

Cameron: There is too much data for one person to process? Or is it that you all listen to the same tape and you’re looking for consensus on the coding?

Debra: You look, initially, and then once you got consensus, which is called reliability, that two people can reliably see the same thing encoded in the same way, then you can go off and people can code independently. It takes about 10 hours to code one hour of tape, once you get going.

Cameron: How long does it take to develop that reliability, because this is pretty crucial to any social science field research, that you have some agreement over what you see.

Debra: It takes, how long does it take, you know maybe 20 hours of training? And then you constantly do checks. You have somebody who is the gold standard, who really knew the coding scheme, and others who be trained up to that standard and repeatedly checked to ensure that they're still doing it accurately.

Cameron: So with these codes, you've got a record, then, in your database, of the number of times that a particular kind of event happened, submission, for instance.

Debra: That's right. You not only have the number of times that it happened, but the sequence in which it happened. And for this peer observation paper, that was what was so important, it was the sequence. Because, for example, we found that when a child initiated bullying, and another child joined in, which often happened, the child started it became more aggressive right after that and more aroused. So having somebody else join in is very reinforcing. It makes you very excited and in some sense it gives you bravado or permission to be even more aggressive. I was interviewed this week on swarming and there is a video that captured a swarming incident here in Canada. And you can see this same process, that it goes very quickly and it accelerates and there's a dynamic in the peer group that takes off, because of the high arousal. And when children are highly aroused, they really don't think clearly. The arousal centres, the emotional centres in their brain, are highly activated and not communicating with the centres that calm that down and think logically. So things can get out of control quite quickly.

Cameron: So swarming is when a bunch of children gather around an attack a person. Is it always physical or can it be verbal? What do you call swarming?

Debra: You’ve described it well. Sometimes it’s verbal but because of this excitatory dynamic, the dynamic that people get more excited and more aggressive and more excited and more aggressive, it can take off quite quickly and accelerate into physical aggression, even if it just started as verbal aggression.

Cameron: Have you managed record any incidents like that when kids are miked up?

Debra: Yes, we have. And you know, initially I hesitated to show those episodes. We have permission from parents, consent from parents, to show them for educational research purposes, but it’s been very helpful to have the videos and to be able to use them in presenting to educators or parents or policymakers, because people often say, “Ah well, it’s just kids being kids.” And when you see it actually happening with real children in real time, it changes your heart. It makes you more concerned and that in turn, I think, changes your attitude about it.

Cameron: How does empathy play into this? Because I think you’re talking about allowing people to empathize with what’s going on when they observe it. What is going on with empathy in the actual incident of bullying? Is it completely absent?

Debra: It’s not completely absent, but it gets quickly overridden by the peer dynamic. So when we observe bullying on the playground, as well as in the classroom, other children are present 88% of the time, 85% and 88%. And those children are spending 75% of their time focused on the child who’s doing the bullying and reinforcing that child, joining in, watching, encouraging, and 25% of the time helping the child who has been victimized. The dilemma for the children who are witnessing is that if the intervene, they’re concerned that they may be the next child who is targeted for bullying, and it doesn’t feel safe for them, especially in a school context where the adults are present and they don’t have trust in adults to deal with the situation. So their peer dynamics shift the power to the child who is doing the bullying, to the children who are being aggressive, and in some ways takes it away from the child who’s been victimized, as well as for that group of children who are tending and look concerned for the victimized child but are a bit frozen in knowing what to do.

Cameron: Can you teach kids what to do?

Debra: You can. You can teach them. There are a whole range of strategies, and children are very good at generating these themselves. The issue is that it takes quite a high status child, a high social status child, a popular child, to have the courage to intervene because it requires courage and there is some vulnerability in doing that. But the most successful bullying prevention programs, developed out of Finland, engage the peer group and have the teachers engage the peer group, in changing their attitudes about bullying and the expectations that they would intervene if they see it, talk to the teacher if they see it, and gather with other children to support the child has been victimized.

Cameron: You’re talking about the status of the child who might be capable of intervening being important, but you’ve also got some thoughts on the status of the person doing the bullying and how that affects things. In this particular paper we’ve been talking about, you drew on a 1977 paper by Bandura, who identified three conditions that influence the likelihood of children beginning to model themselves on the behaviour of the bully. Like, do they learn to act like the bully? And you said that children are more likely to imitate a bully when the model — the first bully — is a powerful figure, and when that model is rewarded rather than punished for their behaviour, and when there is some sort of similar characteristics that the child feels with the model, something in common. Can you unpack this for me?

Debra: I’d be glad to, because it really helped us understand what was happening in the bullying situation. I think it’s important to say that is not just one type of childhood bully. This a large range of types of children who bully. Some children who bully are highly aggressive and they get their power by being aggressive and by ensuring that other people are fearful of them. This another group that’s really hard to deal with, who are children who are highly skilled. They’ve got good what’s called “theory of mind” — they know what other people are thinking about them and they’re very aware of their status— and they have power because of their popularity. And the aggressive children have power because of their aggression. And so for both of those children, others would want to align with them to be safe, to experience the power that they have, whether it’s positive or negative. And what we found was, when the child who initiated the bullying invited somebody else in, that that child had a high, high probability of stepping in and joining the bully. So not only are 75% of the children watching this child and giving positive attention to the child who is bullying, but when that child invites others in, they re really likely to join in and make the situation worse, because now it is two-on-one or three-on-one. And again, it takes off in a direction that it probably wouldn’t if there were only one child who is bullying and one child who is being victimized.

Cameron: So the reward that the model experiences is the behaviour of the peers, primarily. What about the punishment? You referred to the model potentially being punished and changing their behaviour. Can that come from the peers or does that have to be an adult intervening?

Debra: It doesn’t have to be an adult, but what we found was, when we did the observations and there wasn’t a bullying prevention program in place, teachers intervened in 4% of bullying episodes that we observed on the school playground.

Cameron: Only 4%?

Debra: Only 4%. Teachers are always out on the playground during recess and lunch time, but they’re not attending to that, or the children are so smart, they don’t do it when the teachers are near. Within the context of an intervention, that increased to 11%. So the probability of that child being punished is very low, or disciplined in any way. That being said, when peers have the courage to intervene, it’s highly successful. In our second study, we observed peer interventions and found that 57% of the time, when another child stepped in to attempt to stop the bullying, it stopped within 10 seconds. So when appear counters the reinforcement, and indicates that this isn’t acceptable and does something to support the victimized child, the peer dynamic shifts. The rewards stop coming, and more likely than not, it’s going to stop.

Cameron: So when you use the word punished or punishment, is not necessarily a purely negative thing, it’s even just the lack of reinforcement, for someone to say, “You know, that’s not cool. That’s not acceptable to us on our playground.” I don’t think the average eight-year-old would talk like I just did but you know what I mean, there’s some sort of a signal that that’s not acceptable. Is that enough to qualify as that negative reinforcement?

Debra: Yes, in fact being ignored, or having someone speak out in that way, is a highly powerful deterrent for behaviour, because you don’t want everyone else around to also pull that up, and it’s a cost of doing the bullying. If nobody intervenes, there’s very little cost and a lot of rewards for doing it.

Cameron: I’m interested in the aspect of interpretation in your work, because academic research often involves a lot of interpretation, trying to make sense of data. It is not always black and white. If you’re observing a physics experiment or a medical test of a cancer drug, you may be able to have something that is less subject to interpretation: the person was cured of cancer or wasn’t, or the cancer went into remission in some way. But when you’re dealing with behaviours that are often highly nuanced, he was a researcher have to use your interpretation. And there’s kind of two levels. The first we’ve already talked about, is at the level of coding: was that an act of submission? We have talked amongst yourselves as researchers and we think that yes, we will code that as submission. So there’s that level of interpretation. But once you’ve done all the coding, you still have to make sense of the results of the coding, and there’s a second level of interpretation. How as an academic do you begin to draw conclusions from that kind of data? Is not simply saying, well, 57% of the time this happened, and we’re done our interpretation. What do you do with that data?

Debra: For me, and I’m sure is true for most academic researchers, the research you do, even if it’s innovative, even if nobody else in the world has done it, which was the case for my observations, you still embed your thinking in both the theory and the research field. So you come to it with some type of theoretical understanding. For our work on the playground, that would’ve been that children are in a school context, the culture within the school, the culture within the classroom, and the general norms and culture on the playground, shape the individual children’s behaviour. But more than that, the proximal, the close peer interactions right around the bullying, are probably shaping it as well. Initially, I thought that we would only see one child who bullied and one child who is victimized. It would only be about these two children.

Cameron: Like a binary pair.

Debra: A binary, yes, and it would be just about these two children. And as soon as we started watching the tapes, we came to realize that that close peer context is what’s really driving it. And so, when you think about how to shift it and how to prevent bullying and reduce the problems, that’s the point of intervention. Rather than fixing the individual child you need to shift the peer culture around that, the norms on the playground, the way classrooms are set up, and the way the school is set up to ensure that every child is safe and every child is included.

Cameron: You have done recent work this kind of related to the topic of bullying, but has shifted a little bit. Your recent work is touched on two topics that I’m quite intrigued by. One is dating violence and the other is cyber bullying. Before we talk about what you have actually learned there, I’m interested in how an academic’s career has a trajectory. How do you begin to shift to a new focus? What alerts you to the potential in a new topic? What do you do to shift your resources of attention or funding or whatever, to a new topic? How does that happen for you?

Debra: Well, first I’m a developmental psychologist, and that means I study development. When you look at children in Grades 1 to 6 and you see the dynamics unfolding — and particularly for me it was the dynamics of power relationships and bullying — you start to ask questions about “then what?” What happens to these nine-year-olds when they have learned to use power to control and distress others? And they’re really good at it. What happens when they’re in Grade 9? What happens when they’re in Grade 10? What happens when they’re 25? There are important questions, because if we can understand the development of these problems and how they go off-line into problem behaviours, then we can start to prevent them. In my work, that’s been the driving feature of why I do what I do. So after doing the observations on the school playground and doing a study on bullying prevention in Toronto schools for three years, we really came to understand that this was more complex. As we looked at the tapes, we started to see the onset of sexual harassment. By about age 8 or 9, there was a lot of sexual connotation to the bullying. We started to work with Jennifer Connelly, who is a professor here, and did a longitudinal study. We picked up children when they were in Grades 5, 6 and 7, and we followed them for seven years, until they were in Grades 11, 12, and it was the last year of Grade 13 in Ontario. We followed the same children from elementary to high school, and we were able to do what are called trajectory analyses, or growth analyses. You can take the same youth and look at how their behaviour changes over time, or is consistent over time, or transforms over time. And so what we found was that the children who are bullied at a high rate engaged in sexual harassment at a very high rate: 97% of them engaged in sexual harassment at a high rate. And there is also a very strong link between bullying, which is “power-over,” and dating violence, which is also power-over. And that relationship holds for both boys and girls. So it’s transforming this use of power to distress and control others into other relationship contexts. We were also particularly interested in LGBTQ youth, sexual minority youth, whatever words we want to use to describe youth whose gender identity isn’t mainstream and who may be at risk for that. Because generally children who are at the margins are more at risk of being victimized in children who are the centre of the social group. And what we found for those youth is that they experienced a high, high level of sexual harassment and bullying victimization in high school. They had mental health problems, both externalizing, which means acting out, as well as internalizing, which means depression and anxiety. So they had high levels of those problems. But if you could statistically control for, or take into account, the quality of their relationship with their family and the quality of their relationship with their peers, their levels of mental health problems with the same as the heterosexual youth. So again, it gives us a sense of what to do to prevent that. What you need to do early for those young people’s support their families in understanding them, and accepting them, in nurturing them, and ensure that their peers at school understand these differences and are also supportive and non-aggressive towards them.

Cameron: A lot of the things you’re talking about, in terms of the kind of bullying that you observed in young children and the dating violence, are related to a broader phenomenon in our society, of what I would call, and others call, toxic masculinity. I’m a white male of a certain age, and I'm so deeply concerned about the role of men in perpetuating this kind of violence, and what can be done about it. I'm interested in how you see the link between schoolyard bullying and dating violence and the more general problem of toxic masculinity that manifests itself on the subway, in an elevator, in an office interaction -- inappropriate humour and everything else that extends beyond that -- that seems to pervade our society. There's something going on here about the position of men and their failure to understand themselves as men, and the power that comes from being a white male, particularly in Canadian society. How do you relate these things together? [laughs] Do you have any advice for me, Debra?

Debra: [laughs] Well, I have two sons and a grandson, and I grew up with three brothers, so these are issues I think about all the time, in terms of how do we raise boys to become the kind of men who are caring within their families, within their workplace, within the broader society. Because we really can't survive unless people care for each other. So that being said, I think it's very helpful to understand it through the bullying lens. What's different about bullying, in terms of its definition relative to just aggression, is the power issue, the power dynamic. It's about a person who is powerful or wants to gain power, and how they use that power over another and impose that power on another to distress that person or to control that person or to harm that person. In our society, Western society and other societies as well, has been set up with the notion that men are more powerful than women. The characteristics that men had, being stronger, being faster, being able to hunt, those were very valuable characteristics and they were rewarded and honoured. Man's physical power over women enabled them to hold that position, but those types of characteristics aren't really as valued or as necessary in today's society. So I think many, many, many men — and I was trying to think of what percentage to pull out of my head — I don't know what percentage it is, but I think the young men today, by and large, don't feel that they should have power over women. I think they see women more as equals and that's been a huge change in a short period of time. There are some barriers, however, for boys to step away from the macho, strong, unemotional stance that protects them from being vulnerable and from not being powerful. And yet that's the stance that we need all of us to have in order to work together in a workplace, see the other, be collaborative, to be in an intimate relationship, to parent if you want to parent, because we've learned that that power-over authoritarian stance doesn't allow the other to be fully present because they are stressed by the power differential. They are fearful in the relationship. And so whether it's an intimate partner or a coworker or a child, it really merits stepping away from that toxic view of masculinity that still pervades our society, but I think is less present.

Cameron: It may be less present in a lot of ways, but in other ways it is becoming more blatant. If you look at some of the behaviours of certain groups online and the way that they target specific women journalists or whomever that become the victims of a swarming -- right, an organized swarming around a particular person – there is the sense in which, I don't have the expertise to really describe it in proper words, but I think that there’s a certain amount of narcissism that goes along with bullying. Your inability to recognize that this other person is a person. Everything just has to be about your own emotions, which you're having trouble dealing with. And I see that being collectivized, right, that you get a group of people gathering around. Their need to identify and belong to this group becomes more important than the humanity of the person that’s being targeted. And this dehumanization of the target, in order to somehow feel that you are a person who belongs to something, I think is a huge, huge problem. And unfortunately, the technologies that we've got, Twitter and other social media, really play into that capacity to swarm together and to target somebody.

Debra: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. As we move into social media, the cues that we have in social interaction are erased. When were face-to-face with someone, not only do we see what's happening for them emotionally, we can read their face, but our brains feel what their brains are feeling through what's called mirror neurons. So if they're feeling sad or frightened, our brains are registering that. And so built into our relational or interactional systems are these checks and balances that, for the most part, work. When you remove that and add a sense of anonymity to the interaction, the distance between the person who is being victimized and the person or group of people were being aggressive increases dramatically. And so there is not the same feedback and there aren't the same consequences. Going back to Bandura's notion of punishment or negative reinforcement, that doesn't occur. And Bandura also has a whole field of research on what’s called moral disengagement, and part of that process is a lack of responsibility and a dehumanizing of the other, dehumanizing and blaming the other: she deserved it, she shouldn't have done or said what she said. So all of those processes work in a much less constrained or controlled way because of the distance between the person who's being aggressive and the person whom they're targeting. And so if we think about what that means for development and for education, it means that with this new form of human interaction, this going to be with us forever, we will really need to train children early in entirely different way and help them understand not just how to interact face-to-face, but how to be a good citizen in the digital world.

Cameron: I've got a whole bunch of questions want to ask you about where you go with this research, in terms of policy and school training and stuff like that, but before we get there I just had one specific question. I understand how you collected the data on schoolyard bullying. It was really intriguing to me to put microphones on the kids, and I understand that you even had some placebo mics that you used to make sure that everybody was reacting to the same phenomena. I guess with a $1000 microphone, you can't put one on every kid in the playground. But that way of observing what's going on is quite intriguing to me as a person who often studies numbers in financial reports. How do you go about studying dating violence and cyber bullying? Those are very different phenomena.

Debra: They are very different, and the work that we did, as I mentioned, was in Grades 1 to 6. But even by Grade 6, the young people start to feel really uncomfortable if they are being observed with a mic on. Part of doing research is that it's voluntary, so anybody who participates in your research has to do it voluntarily, and it has to be confidential. And so if a child doesn't feel comfortable, and in fact feels quite stressed being observed, then you shouldn't be observing them. And that's what we found with older children. You have to get into a youth's head and heart when you're studying these things, and really, one of the only ways to do that is to ask them questions. And you can do that in a couple of ways. You can ask them questions on standardized surveys, which really helps you see the overall patterns. But you can also do what's called qualitative research, and do interviews with them to unpack the complexity of it. You can either do the interviews before you do the questionnaires, or the other way around. In our research, we actually asked adolescents to come in with their mothers and their best friends and the romantic partners, and we just did a very constrained observation to try to get a sense of the dynamics in those relationships. Because the focus of my work has, for the past 40 years, has been on the quality of relationships and how relationships shape child and youth development.

Cameron: I think what you're getting at is the need to reinforce the healthy relationships that a person has in their network of family, friends and peers, that that is kind of like the basis of healthier relationships in dating, or online in bullying.

Debra: It's interesting. It's not just the foundation of healthier relationships, but children's brain development, brain architecture, brain activity, children's genetic expression, all relate to the quality of relationships in which they raised from birth. And so we need as a society, to turn our heads and put the child in the centre and recognize that that child needs to be held and nurtured and supported in the context of really positive relationships throughout childhood and adolescence. But the data on disease in older adults is that isolation, social isolation, is a higher risk for chronic disease than smoking or a whole lot of other very negative processes. So that's where I'm going with my research.

Cameron: I'm interested in how you see the relationship between your research and actually effecting these changes in society, either through education or policy. You use a phrase about academics needing to "reach across the science-practice gap," and I wonder how you see yourself doing that.

Debra: I'm fortunate. I've had many opportunities to do that. In 2006, I co-founded the Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network (PREVNet) with my former student, Wendy Craig. It was funded by the Networks of Centres of Excellence, a grant program that was in Canada. The purpose of our network was to do just that, to close that gap between science and practice, and help the scientists understand and look at practice, and move their research into the practice, but also for the practitioners to see the value of research and how it related to their day-to-day, moment-to-moment work with children and youth. We grew that network to 120 researchers and 62 national organizations. I've also had other opportunities. I spent eight years on the Safe Schools Action Team, and sat around a table — I was the expert researcher — shaping education policy, literally shaping education policy for three different phases. I felt like I could bring my research to the table and inform that policy and ensure that, at least on paper, children and youth are protected to the best of the school's ability in issues of bullying and sexual harassment and cyber bullying. The issues haven't gone away, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees that every child should be safe and nurtured, and yet a lot of children experience violence. So recently I've been involved in the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF's new initiative to end violence against children. And so I'm working with UNICEF and the Child Rights Organization in Canada to work with the government and mount strategies in Canada to end violence against children and youth. And that means the whole range of violence. It means corporate punishment in the home. It means bullying at school. It means violence on the streets. We actually have a long way to go. It's interesting that when you look at the data for Canada, were not doing very well. An example of that is victimization. We are in the bottom third of rich countries for our rates of victimization. They are very high relative to other countries. We have challenges in not having a national umbrella that looks at children and youth and protects them.

Cameron: So this requires you to engage in different institutional constructs or arrangements. If you want to change behaviours and policies in the school, you need to understand the school system. If you want to deal with cyber bullying, then it’s a completely different situation: you're dealing with these transnational giants like Facebook and Twitter. How do you go about this? Do you get spread thin in all these different institutional contexts?

Debra: You do get spread thin, and I think that was the brilliance of the networks that were set up through the Networks of Centres of Excellence, because it can only be done in partnership. It can only be done when you reach across the table and do the work together. So as a researcher, I really don't know school policies. I really don't know the struggles that principals face in ensuring their school is safe and operating and the relationships are healthy. So you can only do that work in partnership. Facebook is a partner within PREVnet, as are other telecommunication companies. And it's in that partnership that you can co-create something that neither of you could do alone. The researchers bring empirical or research knowledge, but the partners bring incredible practice knowledge, knowledge about what it's like on the ground, knowledge about what's possible, knowledge about which children and youth and families are most vulnerable. So it's in that coming together in partnership that really makes a difference. And I'm going to say that that's been the incredible privilege I've had in my own research. I started to co-create in partnerships in 1984. So 35 years ago, I was on the ground listening to clinicians and co-creating research projects. And I have had the privilege of doing that in many, many organizations since then, and have continued to benefit by the contributions that the people on the ground, the experts on the ground, have given to the research that we do together.

Cameron: You have dealt with some profoundly sad topics in your research. Schoolyard bully. Dating violence. Cyber bully. Do you have grounds for optimism? Where would you find that sense of the potential for positive change?

Debra: I do have grounds for optimism, I do. I have been in some very sad places and right now I'm deeply embedded in issues facing Indigenous communities in Canada, and those are also around power-over and just destruction of relationships. But I think my optimism comes from meeting children and youth. I think my strongest hopes come when I meet young people or hear young people or see young people, because they see what's right and wrong. You know, whether it's the environment and they're worried about where our world is going, or whether it's peace in their community, or whether it's a strategy to include everyone at school, they are young enough and open enough and have enough time and space to be remarkably compassionate if we give them that opportunity, if we don't set up heavily competitive, power-over structures, but allow them, as the Convention on the Rights of the Child suggests, to share power, to guide important decisions in their own lives, and give them the autonomy, independence, recognition and respect that they well deserve.

Cameron: Debra, thank you for joining us on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure and an education to learn about your research.

Debra: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Cameron: Wonderful, thank you.