Physical and Nonphysical Bullying Victimization of Academically Oriented Students: The Role of Gender and School Type by Brett Lehman

Most of us can picture a nerd who gets bullied in middle school and high school. When we think back to our time in school we might even have memories of when we were bullied, when we were the bully, or both. And, documentaries such as “Bully” or media coverage of teenage suicides connected to bullying remind us of how common the experience of being bullied still is today. Considering all of that, we might assume that bullying is simply a normal part of being a teenager and that there is not much we can do about it except for raising awareness on an individual level.

As a sociologist, it is my job to question assumptions like that. Similarly, sociologists studying education have already questioned assumptions stating that academic achievement is due to inborn differences in intelligence. For example, it is widely accepted that a student going to school in a wealthy community with brand new facilities is more likely to succeed compared to a student going to a school with dilapidated facilities in a community where most are in poverty. Although we know about many environmental conditions that influence students’ achievement, we know far less about how the school environment is related to the likelihood of being bullied. In my research, I took the stance that social inequalities in United States schooling could be related to who gets bullied in United States high schools and why. Inequalities based on social class and gender play prominent roles in the article.

My research is also motivated by other researchers’ in-depth observations of students as they go about their day-to-day lives in schools. A host of such researchers in various Western countries have noted that boys get picked on for high academic effort and achievement. Further, academic effort and achievement is often perceived by one’s classmates to indicate a lack of masculinity. As many can attest to anecdotally, a lack of masculinity could make someone an easy target to be bullied. However, I couldn’t be sure if this phenomenon was prevalent across the United States because the observations came from case studies at a small number of schools. I wanted to look for large-scale quantitative data to figure out just how prevalent that kind of bullying was. Additionally, I wanted to study data from many different kinds of high schools to compare the importance of the school environment as it relates to who gets bullied and why. I was able to do this by analyzing data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 which was conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.

My analyses led me to conclude that the bullying of male, academically-oriented students has been a widespread phenomenon. Specifically, my results supported the hypothesis that having a high GPA does make boys more likely to be bullied on a national scale even after accounting for individual students’ race, social class, disability status, participation in sports teams, and academic track. In other words, even though the other characteristics are related to how much someone gets bullied, the relationship between GPA and bullying (for boys) was still significant. This pattern made me think of gender roles and previous research on education and masculinity. It suggests that academic achievement is less likely to be viewed as a way of demonstrating one’s masculinity. However, there are important differences in this pattern depending on the type of bullying and how wealthy of a school the students attended.

There are many forms of bullying and the data I analyzed were able to measure many different experiences of being bullied. For example, students reported how often they were threatened with physical harm, physically hit, had possessions forcefully taken, had belongings damaged or destroyed, and how often they were involved in a physical fight. Each of these questions were collapsed into the category of physical bullying.   Students also reported the extent to which they felt put down by other students in class and the extent to which they felt literally “bullied” by students in their school. Considering that the students had already been asked about physical incidents, these questions were collapsed into the category of non-physical bullying.

In the poorest schools, boys with high GPAs are bullied through physical attacks.

The nationally representative results previously mentioned applied to both kinds of bullying. However, separating students based on what percentage of their school received free or reduced-price lunches revealed more information.   In schools where a third or more of the students qualified for those benefits, boys with high GPAs were bullied physically. This was not the case for non-physical kinds of bullying. In other words, in the poorest schools, boys with high GPAs are bullied through physical attacks.

So, how does this improve our knowledge about bullying? The findings tell us that if we want a deeper understanding of bullying, social inequalities as well as the school and the community environment matter. It may not be surprising to learn that there is gender inequality in the extent to which boys are bullied through physical means compared to girls. However, now we have evidence that shows some of this difference is related to academics. Further, low-SES schools are the environments where this inequality in bullying is most likely to occur. In these schools, physically bullying male academically-oriented students seems to be a traditionally masculine response for failing to conform to traditionally masculine expectations. This is happening even as the importance of academics and graduating from college continues to increase. Allowing bullying to continue in these schools could exacerbate problems of low achievement and low rates of college attendance if the victims avoid achieving their potential because of bullies.

To address these problems, anti-bullying initiatives can be integrated with achievement-oriented programs. Children of any gender can be taught that all classmates deserve to be treated with respect, that there is more than one way to be masculine (or feminine) and that the highest achievers should be lifted up rather than put down. Still, these messages will fall on deaf ears if society does not invest in the country’s poorest schools and communities. If students do not see a realistic path out of their impoverished communities, they will continue to feel cynical about their time in school and focus on alternate forms of social status such as popularity or masculinity – and the bullying will continue.

Read the entire article, “Physical and Nonphysical Bullying Victimization of Academically Oriented Students: The Role of Gender and School Type” in the November 2015 issue of the American Journal of Education.