Condemned in childhood: bully victimization and labour market outcomes

ABSTRACT

Bullying not only has immediate effects but also constitutes long-term impacts on a child’s life. We use the Young Lives dataset, spanning India, Peru, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, to understand the effects of adolescent bully victimization on adulthood labour market outcomes. Utilizing an instrumental variable approach, we find evidence that being bullied during adolescence reduces the likelihood of an individual’s enrolment into tertiary education while increasing the likelihood of labour market participation. Victims are also likely to work longer hours and days while earning less than their non-abused peers. This may be due to lower hourly wages. We propose the need for increased awareness and education policies designed to deter school-level bullying, which could result in significant human capital gain.

KEYWORDS:

• Bully victimization
• physical abuse
• labour market
• young lives

Acknowldgement

The authors would like to thank Md. Irtaza Mahbub Akhond, Eann Mark Rozario, and Mohammad Fayaz Zian for excellent research assistance. This research was completed while Adnan was in receipt of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship at The University of Western Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Note that Young Lives also tracked a younger cohort of about 2,000 children from each country. We do not use the younger cohort for analysis as they were still aged 15 in round 05 (2016).

² Supplementary Table A1 segregates by abused and non-abused children; Table A2 provides statistics by country.

³ The data is obtained from the Indian National Crime Records Bureau, Peruvian National Police, Vietnamese National Center for Criminal Record, and Ethiopian Federal Police Commission, and matched respectively for each country. In cases where 2009 data was unavailable, 2010 data were used instead.

⁴ Supplementary Table A4 provides country segregated results. The results are mainly driven by India, Peru, and Vietnam. Removing Ethiopia from the sample strengthens the results. Direction and significance of results also remain consistent when utilizing a continuous ‘Physical Abuse’ variable.