How Adolescents Cope with Bullying at School: Exploring Differences Between Pure Victim and Bully-Victim Roles

The aim of the present study was to investigate the use of specific coping strategies by bullied adolescents, taking account of the distinction between pure victims and bully-victims, as well as gender-specific patterns. Participants were 967 adolescents aged 11–16 years, who responded to self-report questionnaires on school bullying victimization, cognitive coping, and situational coping. Adolescents in the pure victim, bully-victim, and noninvolved groups did not differ in their use of approach coping. However, pure victims and bully-victims used more avoidance coping than noninvolved adolescents. Compared with the latter, pure victims reported greater use of avoidance coping strategies such as internalizing and self-blame, while female pure victims also reported greater use of rumination. Both male and female bully-victims were characterized by higher use of blaming others and self-blame strategies, compared with the noninvolved group. In addition, rumination, catastrophizing, cognitive distancing, and externalizing scores were higher for male bully-victims than for either noninvolved participants or pure bullies. Identifying these differing coping strategies may be useful in developing more effective counselling strategies for the victims of bullying.