Speak up or stay silent: Can teacher responses towards bullying predict victimized students’ disclosure of victimization?

ABSTRACT

Many children who are victimized by their peers do not tell their teachers. Subsequently, teacher intervention and support are not likely to take place. To investigate the role teachers can play to promote disclosure by victimized students, we examined (1) the prevalence of disclosure to teachers, and (2) the extent to which teachers’ responses towards bullying longitudinally predict victimized students’ disclosure to their teacher. Participants were 874 Dutch primary school students (Grades 4–6) who reported being victimized, and their teachers. Of the victimized students, 76.8% reported that they disclosed to someone and 58.3% of them told their teacher. Multilevel binary logistic regression among all victimized students and a subsample of persistently victimized students (n = 316) revealed that neither teacher-reported active intervention nor passive intervention at T1 predicted victimized students’ likelihood to disclose to their teacher at T2. Implications for future research and for practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Victimization
• bullying
• disclosure
• teacher responses
• longitudinal design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ As a robustness check, we conducted additional analyses using only students in the waiting list condition. This yielded mainly similar results. Therefore, results from the larger and more representative sample combining both study conditions are reported.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a grant from The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO; 405-15-781).