Boys' Education: Conflict and Bullying

“This study is the first to consider long‐term outcomes of one of the most frequent acts of violence among adolescent boys—physical fighting. The study also provides new knowledge about mechanisms of the interplay between adolescent boys' physical fighting and intelligence in explaining adult outcomes. In general, boys' physical fighting is related to adverse adult outcomes in employment, education, and crime….Boys with high intelligence attained equally high levels of education, independent of whether or not they report fighting during their adolescent years. In contrast, fighting was related to fewer years of education for boys with average and low intelligence.”

"“This article considers the ways in which school bullying is both gendered and embodied. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two lower-secondary schools in northern Vietnam, the article focuses on the experiences of one ninth-grade boy, who was regularly bullied by his classmates, and whose experiences of bullying appeared to be embodied for all to see. Inspired by Arthur Brittan's notion of masculinism, Elizabeth Grosz's use of the möbius strip metaphor for understanding embodiment, and Urie Bronfenbrenner's conceptualization of the ecological environment, I argue that school bullying needs to be understood not only in terms of the interactions between individuals or groups of individuals, but also in terms of the specific gendered social-ecological environment within which those interactions occur.”

“Our analysis shows that school staff as well as students lack both the lenses to recognise and the vocabulary to articulate indirect relational aggression performed and experienced by boys. In other words, they lack basic conditions for combating severe forms of bullying and offensive behaviour among boys.”

“Poor communication patterns between parents and adolescents can cause adolescents to become perpetrators of bullying. Adolescents who have friends with positive roles have opportunities as a protective factor against bullying. Male gender has a greater chance of bullying than female. The existence of bullying intervention programs can minimize the incidence of bullying in schools.”

“School bullying has a detrimental impact on students, including sense of isolation and diminished school connectedness. The current study adopted social capital theory to examine the role of school connectedness as a moderator on the association between peer victimization and loneliness…. Results supported existing literature revealing there was a significant mean difference in school connectedness by gender. School connectedness buffered the relationship between peer victimization and loneliness for girls as a moderator, whereas this moderating effect did not appear for boys. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.”