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Childhood Risk and Protective Factors as Predictors of Adolescent Bullying Roles

Bullying is an aggressive behavior present in children and adolescents that has some very serious consequences. Teachers and schools make an effort to decrease bullying through anti-bullying programs (Farrington and Ttofi 2009). Also, physicians have an important role in identifying children at risk, counseling families, screening for comorbid disorders, and advocating for the prevention of bullying (Lyznicki et al. 2004). Bullying is a challenge in primary care (Klein et al. 2013) and was found to be among the top ten health concerns of parents of children ages 2 to 17 (Shetgiri et al. 2015). Thus, bullying is a very serious public health problem that needs to be addressed by schools, by different health care services, and the society in general.

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Understanding, preventing, and intervening in bullying require knowledge about risk and protective factors. Although the number of studies on bullying has increased greatly in the past decades, comprehensive longitudinal research with several waves of data is rare. The present study is based on seven waves of data on 916 children followed up from ages 7 to 17. Several risk and protective factors were discovered, together with interaction effects that showed how protective factors can neutralize risk factors.

The present findings showed that some mental health problems increased the risk of involvement in bullying. Internalizing problems were a risk factor for persistent victimization and for early-onset bully/victims. ADHD was a risk factor for late-onset bullies and persistent bully/victims. Thus, early detection and treatment of these mental health problems could potentially decrease bullying.

Individual factors, such as high moral neutralization and low self-control, increased the risk of involvement in different bullying roles. Low self-control predicted an early onset of victimization, perpetration, and being a bully/victim, and it was a risk factor for perpetration for boys more than for girls and a risk factor for victimization, especially for children who reported substance use. Thus, it could be desirable to address these risk and protective factors in anti-bullying programs that are conducted in schools around the world (Gaffney et al. 2019), preferably already in childhood. These factors are often included in social and emotional learning programs (Durlak et al. 2011), and therefore, it would be desirable to increase funding for research and practice focused on social and emotional learning and anti-bullying programs, so that they could be empirically validated and conducted in all schools.

Parental monitoring was found to be a protective factor against perpetration (early onset and persistent), whereas corporal punishment was a risk factor for late-onset perpetration and being an early-onset bully/victim. Having divorced parents was also a risk factor for being a late-onset bully/victim. For perpetration, high parental monitoring was especially protective for children who did not like school. These findings could be useful to improve parenting practice (Baldry and Farrington 2000; Gomez-Ortiz et al. 2014), by recommending good parental monitoring and decreasing corporal punishment.

Classmates bonding was found to be protective against involvement in different bullying roles including early-onset perpetration, any pattern of victimization, and early-onset and persistent bully/victims. Social activities with peers were protective against victimization, especially for boys. Thus, it is desirable to foster social competencies and social bonding, as also suggested by previous studies (Gómez-Ortiz et al. 2017; Ortega et al. 2004). In bully/victims, there was a significant interaction effect that showed that high bonding to classmates was especially protective in children with high sensation seeking. Truancy was a risk factor for perpetration for girls. The relation between truancy and bonding to classmates was especially interesting. High bonding to classmates in truant children was a risk factor for perpetration, possibly because antisocial children might show a high bonding to antisocial classmates. High bonding to classmates was protective against victimization in non-truant children. These findings suggest targeting truancy and bonding to classmates within a comprehensive approach.

To our knowledge, this is the first study that included a great variety of early predictors of adolescent bullying, measured in childhood. Nevertheless, this study also has some limitations. Our analyses make it possible to discover predictors, but they do not allow establishing causal relations that could be studied in the future if within-individual changes in these predictors are compared with within-individual changes in bullying. Randomized controlled trials focused on decreasing some risk factors and promoting some protective factors could shed some light on the causes of bullying. Also, the current results were obtained with self-reports that can include some response bias such as social desirability, so other reports could also be useful to confirm the results. Thus, this research fills some gaps in knowledge and also opens up new horizons for future studies.

There are several early risk and protective factors that can be addressed in children to protect them from being involved in bullying in adolescence. Knowledge about these factors and interactions among them can be very useful for public health and school policy and practice. It can be used especially by teachers, primary care, and mental health professionals who can help to address mental health problems, individual factors, parenting practices, peer relationships, and school factors discovered in this study.

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