Found no differences in cyberbullying rates for boys and girls; also, there were more bully-victims among the boys, but no differences were found in the pure victims or pure perpetrators

Feijóo, S. S., O’Higgins-Norman, J., Foody, M., Pichel, R., Braña, T., Varela, J., and Rial, A. (2021). Sex Differences in Adolescent Bullying Behaviours. Psychosocial Intervention, accepted Jan 12 2021. https://doi.org/10.5093/pi2021a1

Abstract: In recent decades there has been a progressive increase in concern and research into the problems of peer aggression, both in the educational setting and more recently, online. The present study sought to explore sex differences in traditional bullying and cyberbullying, since current literature has not reached a consensus in how bullying involvement could be moderated by sex. The sample consisted of 3,174 adolescents aged 12-17 years old who completed a paper survey which included the European Bullying Intervention Project Questionnaire and the European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire. The main results found no differences in cyberbullying rates for boys and girls. In the case of bullying, there were more bully-victims among the boys, but no differences were found in the pure victims or pure perpetrators. When analysing the specific bullying behaviours suffered or perpetrated, several differences were found. However, said differences were discrete and it seems that there are not distinctly differentiated bullying patterns, which discourages the use of clearly differentiated preventive strategies for boys and girls.

Keywords: Bullying, Adolescence, Sex differences

Discussion

The current study sought to determine if the rates of bullying are different between boys and girls by engaging with a large sample of adolescents from Galicia (Spain). The main results show that traditional bullying seemed to be more common than cyberbullying, with a total involvement in any role of 34.4%, while cyberbullying summed up to a total involvement of 14%. This rate is disaggregated into 16.4% victims, 5.9% perpetrators, and 12.1% who were both at the same time (bully-victims) for traditional bullying; and into 5.2% victims, 4.5% perpetrators, and 4.3% bully-victims for cyberbullying. The only differences between boys and girls found in traditional bullying were in the rates of bully-victims (13.9% vs. 10.3%). The cyberbullying rates showed no difference in terms of sex, in line with previous research concluding that neither sex nor gender seem to be associated with cyberbullying (Garaigordobil & Aliri, 2013; Hinduja & Patchin, 2008; Larrañaga at al., 2018; Smith et al., 2008), at least in terms of overall rates.

The traditional bullying victimization behaviours that were most common across the entire sample seemed verbal and subtler forms of bullying like being called names, having nasty things about themselves said to other people, or suffering the spread of rumours about themselves. Except for the spreading of rumours, these were the most common perpetration behaviours as well. Behaviours related to relational or psychological abuse have been found to not be taken sufficiently seriously by school staff in other research (Bauman & Del Rio, 2006), so the fact that these are the most common means awareness must be raised in schools to efficiently tackle bullying. Though there were only differences between boys and girls in the role of bully-victim, several differences in specific behaviours were found. There were differences in all the victimization behaviours, with boys experiencing more physical violence, being insulted or called names and being threatened, while girls were subjected to more relational behaviours, like the spread of rumours or being excluded or ignored by others. In the case of perpetration, boys showed higher rates than girls in almost all the differences found: executing more physical violence, insulting, and threatening others. These findings are coherent with previous literature pointing to different bullying behaviours between boys and girls (Carrera-Fernández et al., 2016; Marcum et al., 2012; Rosen & Nofzige, 2019; Ryoo et al., 2014). However, the logistic regression showed that the differences are not remarkable enough to propose preventive strategies focused on girls and others focused on boys. Although there were certain differences in specific behaviours suffered and perpetrated, it seemed that there is not a clearly defined pattern of bullying for girls and another one distinctly differentiated among boys.

Similarly to traditional bullying but with lower rates, the most common cyberbullying victimization and perpetration behaviours appeared to represent subtler forms of bullying like saying nasty things to others, spreading rumours or excluding someone in social networking sites, chat rooms, or messenger apps. It is worth mentioning that some differences were found between boys and girls regarding the cyberbullying acts they committed, but not in the ones they suffered. Boys presented higher rates in hacking accounts, threatening, creating false accounts or posting embarrassing content of others, while the only behaviour that was more prevalent for girls was saying nasty things about someone to other people. Even if the cyberbullying rates were similar for boys and girls, there seemed to be slight differences in the way boys or girls do it. Girls seem to avoid physical confrontations but resort to emotional and psychological abuse (Marcum et al., 2012), which seems to transfer to their online behaviours by avoiding direct online acts such as hacking accounts or threatening others and favouring subtler ways to bully others instead. It must still be noted that the differences found in present study are discrete. Moreover, in the case of cyberbullying, differences are even lower than in the traditional context, which might imply that the digital environment is a medium where sex differences are blurred to some extent. A greater disparity in the results on differences between girls and boys in the case of cyberbullying compared to traditional bullying has been pointed out by the literature (Garaigordobil & Aliri, 2013; Smith et al., 2019; Wright, 2020), with some authors theorizing that the explanation resides in the fact that cyberbullying involves more forms of indirect behaviours (Marcum et al., 2012).

The differences between boys and girls could be explained by taking into account gender socialization and normative expectation of different behaviour from boys or girls (Smith et al., 2019; Wright, 2020), as well as understanding bullying as a behaviour where the sexes perform in accordance with the gender expected of them (Carrera-Fernández et al., 2016; Rosen & Nofzige, 2019). As stated by previous research, bullying prevention programs should incorporate explanations of gender and promote acceptance of gender diversity (Rosen & Nofzige, 2019). This will allow encouraging positive personal characteristics regardless of the gender to which they are attributed, and at the same time should help to reduce the bullying suffered by people with diverse gender identities and sexual orientation. It may also facilitate for boys to be more open about their experience, as they seem to underreport bullying as to not show weakness (Lai & Kao, 2018) and avoid coping strategies that include help-seeking behaviour (Sittichai & Smith, 2018). However, conducting differential intervention efforts between girls and boys does not seem adequate to prevent bullying, as they do not have clearly divergent patterns to suffer nor to perpetrate bullying. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that it has been stated that prevention programs seem to be more effective among boys by being more effective in bullying behaviours that are most prevalent among them (Chocarro & Garaigordobil, 2019; Kennedy, 2020a; Kennedy, 2020b; Smith et al., 2019). From this and the fact that relational or psychological abuse is considered less serious by school staff (Bauman & Del Rio, 2006), it can be inferred that more subtle or indirect behaviours may not be sufficiently addressed in current prevention and intervention programmes and may require further development in the future.

Finally, this study has three main limitations that should be mentioned. The first is the non-probability sampling used. Although it has allowed us to analyse a large sample (a total of 3,174 adolescents), the results are less generalizable to the wider population. Second, the small sample size of those involved in cyberbullying hinders the exploration of sex differences, as sometimes the rates of one group doubled the other but were not statistically significant. Thirdly, using sex instead of gender can be a superficial analysis and requires further research from a gender perspective. Despite these limitations, the results presented here add to the growing literature investigating sex differences in bullying and inform about the current situation in Galicia for adolescents in this regard. Mainly, this study shows that in the assessment of bullying from a gender perspective it may be key to focus on behaviours that females and males engage in, even if the overall rates seem similar. Future research should look into cultural and social constructions that may be mediating different behaviours expressed by boys and girls. This will in turn favour the development of more effective intervention and preventive strategies for traditional bullying and cyberbullying (Espelage et al., 2004; Smith et al., 2019).