Little is known about bullying in rural areas. The participants in this study included 3,610 racially diverse youth (average age = 12.8) from 28 rural schools who completed the School Success Profile-Plus. Binary logistic regression models were created to predict bullying victimization in the past 12 months, and ordered logistic regression was used to predict school hassles in the past 12 months. Overall, 22.71% of the sample experienced bullying victimization and school victimization rates ranged from 11% to 38%. Risk factors for bullying victimization included younger students and students experiencing depression and anxiety. Being female, Hispanic/Latino or African American, was associated with lower bullying victimization. Thirty-nine percent of the sample reported a high level of school hassles. Younger students and students with higher levels of anxiety and depression were at increased risk for school hassles. Students from larger schools reported high levels of school hassles, while students from schools with more teachers with advanced degrees reported fewer school hassles. 1. Introduction According to The National School Safety Center, bullying is the most enduring and underrated problem in US schools [1, 2]. In a nationally representative sample, nearly 30% of students surveyed reported being involved in bullying in the current term, either as a perpetrator or a victim [3]. A more recent study found that prevalence rates for the past two months varied by type of bullying: 20.8% of students surveyed were involved in physical bullying, 53.6% in verbal bullying, 51.4% in relational bullying, and 13.6% in cyber bullying [4]. Bullying is a form of aggression in which one or more children intend to harm another child who is perceived as being unable to defend himself or herself [5]. Many researchers define bullying by four central features [6, 7]: intention (i.e., the perpetrator intentionally uses bullying to establish dominance or maintain social status) [8, 9], power imbalance (i.e., the bully is physically and/or psychologically more powerful than the victim) [3], repetition (i.e., the bullying occurs repeatedly over time) [3], and provocation (i.e., the victim does not provoke the bully). Bullying behaviors include name-calling, physical assault, threatening, stealing, defacing personal property, writing harmful statements, spreading rumors, intentional exclusion, extortion, and taunting [1]. Regardless of the chosen behavior, bullying is characterized by intense intimidation that creates a pattern of humiliation, abuse, and fear for the victim
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