Peer Victimization among Secondary School Going Children: A Descriptive Study in Tangail, Bangladesh

Abstract

Peer group is both a social group and aprimary group of people who have similar interests, age, background, or social status.Adolescents tend to spend more time with their peers and have less adult supervision.At an early age, the peer group becomes an important part of a child (Curtis, J. E., et.all, 2008).Unlike other agents, such as family and school, peer groups allow children to escape the direct supervision of adults (Macionis, et.all, 2010).Although there are various positive attitude of peer group such as serve as a source of information, teach gender role, teach unity and collective value in life, serve as a practicing venue in adulthood, identity formation etc., there are also various negative attitude which are Peer pressure, risk behavior, aggression and pro-social behavior, sexual promiscuity (Dumas, T. D., 2012).Some time it is seem that children are victimized by their peer in absence of supervision of their guardian.Much of the aggression in schools, especially during adolescence, involves individuals "bullying" their peers (Boulton, et.all, 1999).When children and adolescents want to express anger and contempt toward peers, they sometimes aggress physically and also hurt others by friendship manipulation, social exclusion, and negative gossip or back stabbing (Crick, et.all, 1996).It has been estimated that 10% to 30% of children, during a given school can be identified as victims on the basis of severity, frequency, or salience of their peer victimization experiences (Kochenderfer & Ladd, 1996).In contrast to earlier beliefs that boys were more likely to be victims of peer aggression than girls, investigators now tend to agree that boys and girls are equally likely to be victimized.Some studies show that boys tend to report more physical victimization whereas girls are more likely to be either verbally victimized or excluded from their peer groups (Paquette, J. A. & Underwood, M. K., 1999).On the other hand, the physical form of Abstract:The main intent of the study is to describe the forms of peer victimizations, response towards victimizations, and its impact on victims.In recent age, the concept of 'peer victimization' is crucial and debatable issue in social science academic field as well as popular in media issues.The study used descriptive research design and was conducted by quantitative survey method.Data were collected from a diverse sample of 203 students from six to ten grade, who have been randomly selected by using random digit method.Bivariate analysis has been used to find association and to test hypothesis by using chi square.The findings show that verbal victimization is the most common type of peer victimization, where 'Name Calling', 'Pushing' and 'Social Exclusion' were determined as the most common forms of verbal, physical and social peer victimization respectively.Moreover, Cross-tabulation represent various relation between gender and friends' role, long-term effect, and number of friends.Furthermore, Cross tabulation shows that boys are more victim of physical victimization than girls and who have more friends they have less probability of victimizations.Additionally, the results also show that boys are being revengeful after victimization, in contrast girls have trust issues as immediate response.