Efforts to combat school-aged bullying in Canada may be working – for boys.
Girls, on the other hand, are experiencing an increase in the amount they are bullied, and finding it more difficult to cope with everyday psychological stressors. Unfortunately, the gap in numbers continues to grow between boys and girls on all sorts of measures of health and well-being.
According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, which sampled 9,288 students in grades 7 through 12 in Ontario, found that, increasingly, more girls than boys are facing school bullying (31% vs. 26%). The survey also determined that the most prevalent form of bullying in schools is by verbal attack, with 25% of students reporting that they had been bullied in this manner. Additionally, 1 in 5 students who participated in the survey reported that they had been bullied over the internet in the past 12 months, and girls were nearly twice as likely as boys to be bullied in this way (28% vs. 15%).
So why is it that boys are bullying less and girls are bullying and getting bullied more? It has been suggested that because girls tend to engage in more verbal and relational bullying, that texting and social networking allows them to bully via relational aggression on a bigger scale. Another consideration is that many bullying prevention programs have focused on preventing the bullying style most commonly used by boys, that is — one-on-one, physically aggressive bullying. But, according to the survey, bullying isn’t the only thing that has become increasingly bad for girls.
(Source: www.bccf.ca)