School Gate blog: I was bullied. Now I fear the same will happen to my children

Girls are significantly more likely to be victims of long-term bullying than boys, research indicates.

Those bullied at six years old are twice as likely to be victims of bullying by the age of 10 than their male peers, according to the first important study tracking bullying over time.

Girls form tight friendship groups and best friendships at an early age, whereas boys tend to roam around and have more and a greater variety of friends, the researchers from the universities of Warwick and Hertfordshire said.

“Once a girl is out of that network and a victim of bullying, it’s much more difficult to get back in and be integrated, and they are more likely to become a victim of stable or chronic bullying,” Dieter Wolke, who carried out the research, said.

The experiences of bullying encountered by 663 children were tracked at 6 and again at 10. Bullying was defined as experiencing physical or verbal abuse at least once a week over a period of six months.

The research also suggested that as children grow-up, they tend to suffer emotional rather than physical or verbal abuse. Only 10 per cent of the children said that they had endured emotional bullying, including exclusion from a friendship group, at 6. By 10. that figure had jumped to 25 per cent.

Girls are most likely to become involved in such bullying, including being the subject of malicious gossip.

Professor Wolke called for intervention programmes to help children to escape continuing victimisation and said that the long-term bullied have a higher chance of suffering mental health problems in adolescence and playing truant from school.

“We need innovative ways to help children make friends and to learn how to cope when parents and teachers aren’t there,” he said.

Claude Knights, director of the children’s charity Kidscape, said that boys tended to inflict physical harm, which is more easily forgiven, whereas for girls who are emotionally bullied the hurt is much deeper and longer lasting. But she added: “Gender differences have decreased and girls have begun to bully physically as well as boys. With the advent of cyber-bullying there is more emotional and psychological bullying from boys.”

Richard Piggin, of Beat Bullying, said that the emotional effects of bullying can be long lasting. “Perhaps young boys might look to resolve it and be more confrontational about it. They may have found someone to turn to whereas girls have found it more difficult to do that,” he said.

The research also looked into hierarchical structures in classrooms by asking the children to name the three pupils they most liked. Children from classes with strong hierarchical structure who suffered relational bullying were more likely to have moved schools, before their last year of school. Of the initial cohort, 171 children moved schools before the second stage of the study.

“These children had fewer friends and were not integrated,” Professor Wolke said. Parents were more likely to move them from the school as a result, he added.

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