Victimization Types

This chapter explores different types of school-based victimization, physical victimization, threats, and verbal-social (such as exclusion). It presents the frequency of the various victimization types and examines their association with context factors such as gender, ethnic/cultural group, age/grade, and school level. Findings are compared with a California sample. Main findings include the following: boys are at least twice as likely as girls to be victimized physically in Israel and California. Primary schools have higher rates of physical victimization than junior high, and high schools have the lowest for Israel and California. Arab and Jewish children show similar patterns. Victimization by physical violence and threats show similarlity regarding gender, age, and culture. Verbal-social victimization has very different age, culture, and gender patterns. With verbal-social victimization, culture and gender are the most important variables and age makes less of an impact. Religious girls show a sharp decline in physical victimization in junior high, when they begin to attend all-girl schools.