Protective Factors for Violent Victimization in Schools: A Gendered Analysis

ABSTRACT

While the link between childhood abuse and future victimization has been developed, the effects of other negative events in childhood on future victimization, and whether protective factors may guard against it, remains unclear. To address this topic, the relationships between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES), protective factors, and violent school victimization were assessed using a sample of 12,850 boys and 14,121 girls in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades. Non-abuse ACES items were found to significantly predict violent school victimization for both boys and girls, and protective factors were found to moderate the relationship between the two in several instances. Future research should examine ACES items separately by gender, and the cumulative effect that different protective factors may have on juvenile victimization.

KEYWORDS:

• Victimization
• school victimization
• adverse childhood experiences
• gender

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Kristy Holtfreter and Stacia Stolzenberg for their comments on a previous draft of this manuscript, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on improving it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Data collection was supported by grant funding from the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission.