About Stop Bullying

Stop Bullying & Live by Jerry Halberstadt is the how-to handbook for all stakeholders in multifamily housing, a guide to understanding and preventing bullying and to creating a healthy community. Stop Bullying & Live addresses the widespread and dangerous plague of bullying that creates toxic community and harms everyone living and working in multifamily housing, including elderly and disabled persons. Leaders involved with public and subsidized housing—landlords, managers, service providers, and residents—all recognize the prevalence of bullying but are helpless to remedy this harmful, expensive, and contagious social disease.

Stop Bullying & Live is based on the first documentary history and anthropological analysis of bullying and mobbing in multifamily subsidized and public housing. Halberstadt provides a reasoned approach for legislative and administrative reforms; presents a scientific analysis of bullying based on extensive new observational data; identifies the sources of bullying and an outline of how to prevent bullying. Halberstadt became an advocate for change when he discovered that, in the absence of effective administrative or legal remedies, victims of bullying have no protection. Halberstadt’s efforts as Coordinator of the Stop Bullying Coalition brought together citizens, tenant interest groups, and legislators and resulted in the passage of legislation to create a landmark commission to study and find remedies. Massachusetts Governor Baker appointed Halberstadt as a Commissioner to the Commission to Study Ways to Prevent Bullying of Tenants in Public and Subsidized Multi-Family Housing, pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Resolves of 2016.

Stop Bullying & Live provides the basis for stakeholders to enable a polity in the residential setting—a form of governance with accepted norms and rules that are enforced, and with a means to resolve disputes. In a healthy community, everyone shares responsibility and no person—housing provider/landlord, manager, staff, resident, visitor either bullies or is bullied. The ideas apply wherever people must share common resources, including in multifamily residence situations such as assisted living, homeowners’ associations, and more.