Bullying, Cyberbullying, and Suicide

Abstract

Empirical studies and some high-profile anecdotal cases have demonstrated a link between suicidal ideation and experiences with bullying victimization or offending. The current study examines the extent to which a nontraditional form of peer aggression—cyberbullying—is also related to suicidal ideation among adolescents. In 2007, a random sample of 1,963 middle-schoolers from one of the largest school districts in the United States completed a survey of Internet use and experiences. Youth who experienced traditional bullying or cyberbullying, as either an offender or a victim, had more suicidal thoughts and were more likely to attempt suicide than those who had not experienced such forms of peer aggression. Also, victimization was more strongly related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors than offending. The findings provide further evidence that adolescent peer aggression must be taken seriously both at school and at home, and suggest that a suicide prevention and intervention component is essential within comprehensive bullying response programs implemented in schools.

Keywords:

• bullying
• cyberbullying
• Internet
• suicide
• suicidal ideation
• youth

Notes

¹More information about the sampling strategy and data can be found in Hinduja and Patchin (2009).

²Readers should note from the behaviors selected for our cyberbullying measure that we intended to capture a relatively broad measure of cyberbullying that might better be characterized as “online harassment.” That said, given our restriction to repeated incidents, we feel it is appropriate to label these experiences as bullying. Moreover, some may question our decision to include relatively minor behaviors that may not necessarily be considered bullying (such as receiving upsetting emails or having something posted on MySpace that was upsetting). While we can think of examples of such experiences that would fall outside the realm of cyberbullying, we once again sought to explore these issues from a macro-level perspective. This issue is further confounded by the fact that cyberbullying researchers have not settled on an agreed-upon measure. Our results should be interpreted with these considerations in mind.

³It should be noted that the prevalence of suicidal ideation found among our sample is comparable to other studies focusing on adolescent populations (Corcoran & Graham, 2002; Langhinrichsen-Rohling & Lamis, 2008; Morgan & Hawton, 2004).

***p < .001 (two-tailed).

*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 (two-tailed).

⁴We chose to code both “never” and “once or twice” as “0” since bullying represents a repetitive pattern of behavior and not just one or two isolated incidents.

⁵While a thorough analysis of the race/suicide relationship is beyond the scope of the current study, when breaking our sample down by several different racial categories we found that White youth reported the lowest suicidal ideation scores (.71), followed by Hispanic (.90), Asian (.94), Black (.96), multiracial (.96), and Native American (1.05) youth.