School bullying and social networks

Abstract

Although school bullying has enormous health, social, and economic consequences that last throughout the entire human life, most bullying- prevention programs are ineffective partially because detecting bullies and their victims is challenging. This study proposes to employ social networks to identify the victims of bullying. To that aim, we elicit friendship and enmity networks and document who suffers bullying in several secondary schools in southern Spain. We show that both friendship- and enmity- network measures are relevant and complementary predictors of victimiza- tion, independent of classic non-network characteristics employed in the literature. However, how individual positioning and global features of the social organization determine who suffers bullying differs across male and female adolescents. We discuss our results in relation to existing theories of bullying victimization in psychology and sociology.