In 1982, three Norwegian adolescents died by suicide after being severely bullied by their peers. The deaths were reported nationally, and they became the catalyst for what is now widely regarded as the first scientifically tested programme anywhere in the world built specifically to reduce bullying and cruelty among schoolchildren.
This is a reading of the research behind that programme, not advice for anyone currently dealing with bullying or its effects. If this touches on something more immediate, a school counsellor, a helpline, or a trusted adult is a better resource than an article.
Where the research actually began
The programme’s originator, Dan Olweus, was Swedish by birth but spent most of his career at the University of Bergen in Norway, where he had already been studying aggressive behaviour among schoolboys since the early 1970s. Following the 1982 deaths, the Norwegian Ministry of Education launched a national campaign against bullying, and Olweus used the moment to run a large-scale study, tracking around 2,500 schoolchildren in Bergen between 1983 and 1985, testing a structured programme aimed at changing the social climate of a school rather than punishing individual incidents after the fact.
The Bergen trial’s own results were striking: a roughly 50 to 60 percent reduction in both being bullied and bullying others among participating students, measured against schools that had not adopted the programme. A later national rollout across Norwegian schools between 2001 and 2005, covering around 21,000 students, found smaller but still substantial reductions, in the range of 30 to 50 percent, within eight months of implementation.
The programme itself was never a single lesson or a poster campaign. It set expectations at several levels at once: staff training so teachers recognised and consistently responded to bullying rather than treating it as normal childhood conflict, clearer school-wide rules against it, structured discussion time in classrooms, and closer supervision during unstructured periods such as breaks, where most incidents of the kind Olweus studied tend to happen. Olweus also developed a structured questionnaire, still used in research today, to measure bullying and victimisation consistently across schools rather than relying on informal reports from staff or students.
What later research found when the programme travelled
The programme, now known as the Olweus Bullying Prevention Programme, has since been tested well beyond Norway, including in the United States, Germany, and Belgium. A widely cited 2011 meta-analysis by Maria Ttofi and David Farrington in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, drawing on 53 separate programme evaluations across many countries, found that anti-bullying programmes in general, including but not limited to the Olweus model, reduced bullying perpetration and victimisation, with the strongest, most consistently designed evaluations at the time coming disproportionately from the Norwegian implementations.
This is one country’s very strong result sitting inside a wider, more mixed international picture, and it should be read that way rather than as proof that the programme works identically everywhere it has been tried. A more recent updated systematic review and meta-analysis, covering around 100 independent evaluations of school anti-bullying programmes globally, confirmed that these programmes are effective on average, but effect sizes documented in the research literature have generally been smaller and more variable outside Norway, particularly in some United States trials, than the original Bergen results.
Why the same programme performs differently in different places
None of the available research settles exactly why a programme built around whole-school climate change, teacher training, and consistent adult intervention produces a larger measured effect in Norway than in some later international trials. Researchers evaluating the programme elsewhere have pointed to differences in how faithfully schools implement the full model, differences in existing rates and cultures of bullying before the programme starts, and differences in how outcomes get measured across studies, as plausible partial explanations. None of this amounts to a settled account, and no single study here should be read as the final word on why the numbers vary.
What the Bergen study and its successors do support, more narrowly, is that bullying and peer cruelty are not simply fixed features of school life that adults are powerless to change. A programme that trains staff to intervene consistently, sets clear and enforced expectations across an entire school rather than a single classroom, and follows up over time produced a large, measured drop in both bullying and being bullied in its country of origin, and a smaller but still real drop in most of the places it has since been tested.
What this does not mean for rudeness generally
Bullying, as Olweus and later researchers defined it, is a specific pattern: repeated, intentional aggression involving an imbalance of power between the people involved, not the broader category of ordinary rudeness, bad manners, or a single unpleasant exchange between adults. The research summarised here concerns school-age children and structured institutional intervention, and it should not be stretched into a general claim about eliminating rudeness in workplaces, families, or everyday adult life, which involves different dynamics and has not been tested by this body of research.
What the Bergen findings do offer, honestly stated, is a narrower and still useful point: a specific, sustained, whole-community effort measurably reduced one well-defined form of interpersonal cruelty in the place it was first tried, at a scale few casual interventions manage. Whether a comparable effort could do the same for rudeness in other settings is a different, and considerably less studied, question.