ABSTRACT
School bullying is a serious social problem, which has received widespread public, media, and research attention over the years. The first study of bullying was published in 1969 by a school physician named P. P. Heinemann (Olweus, 1999), which was subsequently followed by extensive empirical inquiry since the 1970s in Scandinavia led by Dan Olweus (Vaillancourt et al., 2008). In subsequent decades, social scientists have developed a rich theoretical and empirical body of knowledge with regards to children and adolescents’ experiences in bullying. Scholars conceptualise bullying as a sub-category of aggression (Smith et al., 2002), characterised as being purposeful, including an imbalance of power, and being repetitive (Hunter, Boyle & Warden, 2007; Smith, 2014).
