Bullying Sex Stereotypes: Half-Right, According to NYT Data

Posted on 12. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad in Uncategorized

If you’d asked me, before the New York Times began collecting their bullying stories (see my top-line take on the data and the NYT followup post), what trends might emerge when we looked at sex-specific data, I probably would have babbled back a bunch of stereotypes: boys are probably more likely to be physically bullied than girls, girls are more likely to be bullied by “friends,” parents are more likely to intervene with girls. (I would have also made caveats up one side and down the other, because it’s plainly true that none of these stereotypes are uniformly true, only that one outcome was more likely.)

Looking through the data, some — but by no means all — of these ideas are borne out. For starters, boys are physically bullied in the NYT dataset at twice the rate of girls, emotional bullying in girls is about 50 percent higher than we see in boys. (Though — again with the caveats — more than one in four stories about bullied girls involved physical violence or the threat thereof, so it would be wrong to say that boys do “X” and girls do “Y.” There’s a lot of overlap. And though I don’t trust the dataset in this area, seven stories about girls mentioned it was a friend doing the bullying. Only two stories from boys included that detail.

The age of bullying was pretty consistent, though boys were bullied at a slightly higher rate in elementary school, and girls had a slight edge in middle school.

It was the parental involvement that turned expectations around. Boys were a hair more likely to see a parent step in and directly intervene, suggesting that “letting boys be boys” is not a driving force in the response (or lack thereof) to bullying.

The next post will look at the differences between adults reflecting on their own experience and parents talking about their children.

** More caveats (and for even more, check the bottom of my first post): This dataset grouped both adults talking about their personal experiences, as well as talking about the experience of their children, which is a variable I didn’t correct for here (no regression analyses for you!). I’m also limited by the descriptions in the NYT comments themselves. If a comment didn’t mention bullying by a friend or parental involvement, it wasn’t coded. And cyberbullying and “emotional” bullying were treated as distinct categories, when it can easily be argued that it’s just a different form of distribution for the same kind of activity. For the record, there were four episodes of cyberbullying noted; all were in girls.