1102
Paper presentation
Bullying and social categories: Fourth- to eight grade students’ perspectives
Camilla Forsberg
In a recent report from Friends (a Swedish non-profit organization, dedicated to the prevention of
bullying) gender, ethnicity and abelism was the three most common reasons to why 12-15 year old
students were harassed in schools. 12 percent of all girls had also been sexually harassed (Friends,
2016). Bullying could therefore be understood as interlinked with larger social issues, sexual
harassment and gender (Meyer, 2014). In that way it is not neutral who becomes a victim of bullying
(Walton & Niblett, 2012). However, research on bullying has been criticized for not addressing larger
social issues and inequalities (Pascoe, 2013; Walton & Niblett, 2012) and possible intersections
between bullying and gender and bullying and sexual harassment (Meyer, 2014, Shute, Owens &
Slee, 2008). Meyer state that “we need to better understand the relationships between bullying,
sexual harassment, hetero-normativity, homophobic and transphobic behaviors” (Meyer, 2014).
Teachers have also been found to be less likely to intervene when homophobic or sexual bullying
takes place (Meyer, 2008). The missing link between bullying and these issues might be that we use
different concepts for defining what bullying is and what harassment. Bullying has also been
understood as intentional targeted at a certain individual (Olweus, 1993), which excludes those acts
where there are no specific targets. However, bullying, harassment and gender can also overlap
(Meyer, 2014). Duncan (1999) states that a distinction between bullying and sexual harassment is a
false one. The aim with the present study was to take an explorative approach towards students
subjective perspectives of bullying by carefully listen to how they themselves discuss and reason on
bullying. Semi-structured interviews were collected with fourth-to eighth grade students in Sweden.
The data analysis was guided by a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014). I coded
and analyzed how students made sense of bullying and found that they intersected bullying with
different social categories (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age). I also adopted a perspective on bullying open
to how it intersects with for example gender, harassment or ethnicity. The conceptualization of their
perspectives revealed three ways that social categories intersected with bullying: Positioning bullying
types and bullies; Organizing the peer group; and Explanations to why bullying happens.