ABSTRACT
The extent to which bullying plays a part in our society is difficult to quantify. Hansen et al. (2012) state that worldwide prevalence estimates for bullying victimisation in school-aged children vary widely, between 5.3 per cent and 50 per cent. Monks et al. (2009) suggest that this variability is influenced by how bullying is defined, including the frequency level (once a month, once a week, etc.) and the time frame (in the last month, the last six months, etc.). The Tellus4survey (Chamberlain et al., 2010), which collected the views of 253,755 children and young people in Years 6, 8 and 10 in the UK, found that nearly half of children and young people had been bullied at school at some point in their lives, and 29 per cent had been bullied in the previous year. Clearly, these estimates fall at the top of the prevalence range suggested by Hansen et al. (2012).
