The False Sense of Security Provided By “Hot Spot” Monitoring

By Ari Magnusson

I recently spoke to the head of a school in advance of a professional development engagement. She was describing the school’s existing policies and procedures so I would have a good understanding of the current bullying prevention environment when I spoke to the school’s educators. She mentioned that the school uses “hot spot” monitoring, an increase in monitoring in areas where bullying tends to occur, specifically the cafeteria and the playground.

While hot spot monitoring sounds like a great idea, this approach can actually provide a false sense of security in the effectiveness of bullying prevention efforts for two reasons. First, bullying occurs wherever students are able to freely interact and they have a peer audience. When a school increases monitoring in places where bullying typically occurs, such as the cafeteria and playground, and the students become less free to interact, the hot spots simply migrate to places and times where there isn’t the same level of monitoring, such as hallways between classes, before school, after school, the locker room, in classrooms before teaching starts, etc. And for older students who use social media, the hot spots simply disappear into cyberspace where there is no monitoring.

The second reason why hot spot monitoring can provide a false sense of security is the very notion that adults can somehow spot bullying in the sea of aggression that characterizes normal student social interactions. According to statistics, approximately 17–20% of students are being bullied at any one time, meaning that 80+% of the aggression that adults will be observing in hot spot monitoring is harmless. And since targets being harmed by bullying rarely visibly express the emotional distress they are experiencing, adults cannot discern the harmful aggression even when they observe it.

Instead of relying on hot spot monitoring, educators can perform heightened, targeted monitoring, which is far more effective and efficient. Educators can do this in three steps. First, they can educate their students on what bullying is and why it happens in order to depersonalize and demystify the behavior. This will help some targets to realize that the intent of the aggressor is not to cause harm but rather to gain peer approval and respect. Second, educators can periodically communicate to their students (e.g., monthly) that they don’t condone bullying and they are there to help students with bullying problems in a way that does not make them worse. That last part is critical; students need to know that adults will not take counterproductive actions such as punishing the aggressor. Instead, adults will simply get the bullying behaviors to stop. And that can be done quite easily in the third step: educators will implement “chain of custody awareness,” whereby all the adults in the school are notified of a bullying problem and will monitor the students involved from the start of the school day to the end of the school day to ensure the bullying behavior doesn’t continue. In other words, no one—educators or students alike—has to worry about a bullying problem migrating to places and times where there is no monitoring; chain of custody awareness ensures the monitoring will be constant. And educators can make it clear to aggressors that social media should not be used to continue the aggression.

The best part about taking these three steps is that they create an environment where students will feel comfortable coming forward to ask for help. That means educators will not need to try to figure out when bullying is occurring based on observed behavior but will know with certainty from student reporting. And that, of course, should be the goal of all bullying prevention efforts: to have high confidence in knowing about all the bullying problems that exist so that educators can take immediate action to resolve them, whether through student empowerment or direct intervention.