Longitudinal Investigation of Bullying, Sexual Harassment, and Teen Dating Violence from Middle to High School

Bullying, sexual, and dating violence among adolescents are all major public health problems that occur at relatively high rates and co-occur among early adolescents (Author et al., 2009; Author et al., 2011).  However, for decades, scholars have tended to study each type of aggression or violence in isolation of the others and only recently have scholars recognized the need to examine multiple forms of violence simultaneously given the high incidence of poly-victimization, and the degree of overlap over the lifespan (Hamby & Grych, 2013). This longitudinal study is the first to address the associations among these types of violence using a developmental model that reflects the appropriate developmental age-dynamics across early to late adolescence.  This model posits family violence and delinquency would be associated with bullying during middle school and bullying would be predictive of sexual harassment and teen dating violence during high school.  

Three cohorts of students (N = 1161) completed self-report surveys across seven waves of data collection from 5^th grade through 11^th grade.  Structural equation models without latent indicators were fit separately for boys (N = 587) and girls (N = 574) to correlation matrices using the predictors of wave (time), bullying, sibling aggression, delinquency, sexual harassment, and teen dating violence (TDV).

Structural models were built through an iterative process guided by theory and modification indices to evaluate the models.  Exposure to family trauma and violence dropped out of the models.  The final models for girls and boys were a good fit to the data; RMSEAs = .066, .07.  For girls, bullying others, sibling aggression, and delinquency at wave 1 significantly predicted bullying behavior across waves 2 through 5.  Further, bully perpetration at waves 1 through 5 predicted sexual harassment and verbal TDV perpetration at wave 6 which in turn predicted physical TDV perpetration at Wave 7.  For boys, results are similar except that sibling aggression was predictive of bully perpetration only in high school.  Further, delinquency during middle school predicted both bullying and sexual harassment perpetration in high school.  Finally, bullying behavior in middle school predicted sexual harassment perpetration and verbal TDV at Wave 6 which then predicted physical TDV at Wave 7.  Additional mediators and moderators will be added to this basic model to test the full developmental model.  Results support the notion that bullying perpetration during early adolescence predicts later sexual harassment and teen dating violence, and is influenced by sibling aggression and delinquency.