Primary prejudice. Tackling identity-based bullying in pre- and primary school

Partner institutions

KU Leuven

AP Hogeschool

Research description

School bullying is one of the prime causes of mental health issues, learning difficulties and developmental problems among children and adolescents. Unfortunately, we also know that bullying often occurs in Flemish schools. In these cases, children are repeatedly confronted with verbal, physical or material violence and social exclusion. Bullying can have very different causes (e.g. body shape, physical ability, intelligence, socio-economic background, ethnicity and gender) and children internalize prejudicial views about their peers at a very early age, which can in turn translate into subtle or explicit forms of bullying.

Curiously, however, the bulk of current policies designed to tackle school bullying remain targeted at adolescents and are often informed by research that focuses almost exclusively on teenagers. Much less attention is devoted to the existence of bullying behaviour at younger ages, even though international research shows that incidents of physical and verbal violence often peak at elementary school age. One of the reasons for this relative neglect is that established methods for studying bullying in schools (e.g. questionnaires, interviews) are not very well-suited for research with young children. As a result, there is a sizeable gap in our understanding of the prevalence and causes of bullying in Flemish (pre-)primary schools.

This interdisciplinary SBO project, which brings together researchers in sociology, psychology, pedagogy and criminology, aims to address this gap by developing a novel set of methodologies that will aim to explain 1) bullying on the playground, 2) classroom interactions, 3) when prejudicial ideas emerge in children’s social and cognitive development and, finally, determine the role that 4) teachers and 5) teaching materials can play in managing and preventing bullying in Flemish (pre-)primary schools.