Both bullies and bullied students…
Study: Both bullies and bullied students tend to be victims of crime.
USA Today (10/17, Koch) reports, “As a growing number of states pass laws against bullying, new research finds that bullies and their victims are more likely than other children to be victims of crime outside of school.” Researchers from the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center interviewed 689 fifth-grade students in an unidentified “urban, low-income school district in Massachusetts.” They found that about 20 percent of students reported being bullied at some time. “Seventy percent of bullies and 66 percent of bullying victims were crime victims, compared with 43 percent of kids who were neither bullies nor victims.” Students who had been both bullies and victims of bullies were “at greatest risk.” Of those students, “84 percent had been victims of a crime, including burglary and assault, and 32 percent had been sexually abused.” Almost half of the students who had been bullied “were referred to school counselors because of thoughts about suicide.” Since the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado, USA Today notes, “[t]hirty-two states have passed anti-bullying laws” requiring schools to draft prevention programs. “At least nine states this year have passed such a law or expanded an existing one to address the problem of Internet bullying.”
Florida’s NBC affiliate WPTV-TV (10/16) added, “David Walsh, Ph.D., president and founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family, says 12 percent of kids have been bullied on the Internet and 37 percent admit to bullying someone else online.” Research shows that online bullies can be of either gender, and are most commonly between the ages of 9 and 14.
