Bullying Prevention in a Swedish Municipality: Supported Decentralised Reasoning

The national context of Sweden is particularly illustrative for international research, in that bullying and degrading treatment have been a central aspect of policy-making for some time. In Sweden, schools and municipalities are obliged to produce detailed action plans to counteract bullying. The aim of this study is to describe and analyse how practitioners in schools, during implementation of the Municipality Bullying Prevention Model (MBPM), change the way they work and apply decentralised reasoning to prevent bullying. This study makes use of an action-research approach. In the project, bullying prevention is addressed by the participating schools. The findings indicate that practitioners introduced various measures in different places and at different levels during implementation of the MBPM. It also became apparent that bullying prevention work needs to build on a school’s contextual knowledge and have a whole-school approach.