Does the gender of the bully/victim dyad and the type of bullying influence children's responses to a bullying incident?

Abstract

Children's responses to bullying are context related; they will vary depending on the specific bullying episode. The aim of the present study was to explore whether children's responses to bullying vary depending on the gender of the bully and victim and the type of bullying portrayed. In total, 437 children aged 9–11 years from four primary schools in the UK took part in the study. Each child read a story about one child bullying another. There were 12 different versions of the story, varying the type of bullying (verbal, physical, or relational/indirect) and the gender of the bully and victim (i.e., male bully—female victim, female bully—male victim, male bully—male victim, female bully—female victim). Each child was randomly allocated to one of the 12 stories. After reading the story the children then responded to a series of questions to assess their perceptions of the victim and bully and situation. Overall females liked the bully more than males; females also reported liking the female victim more than the male victim and females were more likely than males to intervene with a female victim. The bullying was viewed as more serious, more sympathy was shown to the victim, and there was a greater likelihood of intervention when the incident involved a female bully. There was less liking for the bully if the situation involved a female victim of physical bullying. The findings are explained in terms of social identity theory and social norms about typical male and female behavior. Aggr. Behav. 40:359–368, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Defenders of victims of peer aggression: Interdependence theory and an exploration of individual, interpersonal, and contextual effects on the defender participant role

“…Girls also report believing that their friends expect them to defend victimized peers more than boys believe this about their friends (Rigby & Johnson, 2006), suggesting that defending may be a gender-typical and expected behavior among girls. Girls also are more likely to defend other girls (Fox, Jones, Stiff, & Sayers, 2014), while boys tend to defend boys (Hawkins et al, 2001;Sainio et al, 2011). In childhood and early adolescence, children tend to be involved in gender-segregated groups (Rose & Rudolph, 2006); this may provide more opportunities to provide within-gender defending toward victimized peers.…”

Association between Facial Emotion Recognition and Bullying Involvement among Adolescents with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Previous studies have discovered that ADHD [2,27], depression [2,28], and anxiety [2,29] may be risk factors of bullying involvement and facial emotion misrecognition. In addition, sociodemographic data, such as sex [30] and age [31,32], are often considered relevant to bullying involvement. Therefore, this study controlled for sex, age, and severity of ADHD, depression, and anxiety to identify the correlation between facial emotion recognition and bullying involvement.…”

The role of popular girls in bullying and intimidating boys and other popular girls in secondary school

“…There is much less research which focuses on cross‐gender bullying than same‐gender bullying (Garandeau et al ., ). In terms of adult perceptions of student bullying, ‘a consistent finding is that… aggression toward females is perceived more negatively than incidents in which the victim is male’ (Fox et al ., : 360). Fox et al .…”

“…Fox et al . () argue that these findings can be explained in terms of social norms about male and female behaviour, where women are perceived as weak and vulnerable and men are viewed as strong and aggressive. There has been a common assumption that the ‘power relations’ involved in bullying equate to the bully being physically or psychologically stronger than the victim (Horton, ), which results in the ‘common perception that it is more acceptable for girls to harm boys, since the “strength inequality” or “gender differential” offers impunity for the girl bully’ (O'Brien, : 295).…”