Bullying remains a serious issue for students and their families, as well as policy makers, administrators, and educators. NCES is committed to providing reliable and timely data on bullying to measure the extent of the problem and track any progress toward reducing its prevalence. As such, a new set of web tables focusing on bullying rates at school was just released. These tables use data from the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects data on bullying by asking a nationally representative sample of students ages 12–18 if they had been bullied at school. This blog post highlights data from these newly released web tables.
In 2019, about 22 percent of students reported being bullied at school during the school year (figure 1). This percentage was lower compared with a decade ago (2009), when 28 percent of students reported being bullied at school.
Students’ reports of being bullied varied based on student and school characteristics in 2019. For instance, a higher percentage of female students than of male students reported being bullied at school during the school year (25 vs. 19 percent). The percentage of students who reported being bullied at school was higher for students of Two or more races (37 percent) than for White students (25 percent) and Black students (22 percent), which were in turn higher than the percentage of Asian students (13 percent). Higher percentages of 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-graders reported being bullied at school (ranging from 27 to 28 percent), compared with 9th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders (ranging from 16 to 19 percent). A higher percentage of students enrolled in schools in rural areas (28 percent) than in schools in other locales (ranging from 21 to 22 percent) reported being bullied at school.
Figure 1. Percentage of students ages 12–18 who reported being bullied at school during the school year, by selected student and school characteristics: 2019
1 Total includes race categories not separately shown.
2 Race categories exclude persons of Hispanic ethnicity. Data for Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native students did not meet reporting standards in 2019; therefore, data for these two groups are not shown.
3 Excludes students with missing information about the school characteristic.
NOTE: “At school” includes in the school building, on school property, on a school bus, and going to and from school. Although rounded numbers are displayed, the figures are based on unrounded data.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2019. See Digest of Education Statistics 2020, table 230.40.
Not all students chose to report the bullying to adults at school. Among students ages 12–18 who reported being bullied at school during the school year in 2019, about 46 percent reported notifying an adult at school about the incident. This percentage was higher for Black students than for White students (61 vs. 47 percent), and both percentages were higher than the percentage for Hispanic students (35 percent).
For more details on these data, see the web tables from “Student Reports of Bullying: Results from the 2019 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey.” For additional information on this topic, see the Condition of Education indicator Bullying at School and Electronic Bullying. For indicators on other topics related to school crime and safety, select “School Crime and Safety” on the Explore by Indicator Topics page.
By Ke Wang, AIR