Bullying among preparatory school students: prevalence, gender differences, and relationship with aggression, school type, and socioeconomic status

Background
Bullying is defined as a specific form of aggression, which is repeated, intentional, and involves a disparity of power between the perpetrators and the victim. Bullying can take several forms of behavior, including physical (hitting, pushing, and fighting), verbal (calling names, teasing, spreading rumors, and threatening), social (ignoring, leaving on purpose, and exclusion), sexual (sexual harassment, sexual comments), and cyber (annoying electronic messages through the computer or phone). Verbal and physical bullying are the most common types of bullying in boys, while with females, relational/social bullying is more frequently observed. And bullying behaviors are associated with aggression in school students.
Objective
The authors studied the prevalence of school bullying behaviors and their relationship with aggression, gender, residence area, and school type.
Results
The authors had a total sample of 521 students: males represented 48.4, while females represented 51.6% of the sample. More than half of the sample (54.7%) was students from governmental schools, while 45.3% were from experimental and private schools. Students reported as sometimes involved in bullying in the following sequence: relational bullying (27.1%), verbal bullying (26.9%), cyber bullying (24.4%), sexual bullying (18.4%), and physical bullying (17.9%). Students reported as usually involved in bullying in the following sequence: relational bullying (3.3%), verbal bullying (2.68%), physical bullying (1.7%), sexual bullying (1.7%), and cyber bullying (0.4%). Males had higher scores in verbal, physical, and sexual bullying and lower scores in relational bullying than females with comparable scores regarding cyber bullying. Governmental school students had the highest scores in all bullying domains than experimental and private school students. There were positive and statistically significant correlations between the scores of domains of bullying battery on one hand and verbal as well as physical aggression on the other hand.
Conclusions
Governmental school students are more exposed to all bullying types than experimental and private school students. Adolescents’ bullying is strongly associated with verbal and physical aggression.