Excerpt
“Bias Based Bullying” is defined as physical, verbal, social, or cyber-based threats directed toward a minority population based upon race, ethnicity, religious belief, gender, or sexual orientation and includes a systematic abuse of power that is characterized by intentionality, frequency, and imbalance of power [
32,
33]. Implicit and explicit Bias Based Bullying are associated with several negative health outcomes for adolescents and adults from minority backgrounds including: (1) depressive symptoms, (2) decreased quality of life, (3) anxiety, (4) low self-esteem, and (5) conduct disorders [
3,
6,
10,
23,
29,
31]. Children who experience bullying report significantly more negative externalization and internalization of problems with some indication of links to poor academic functioning [
32]. Other studies report bullying victimization as a risk for negative mental, social, and academic outcomes and associate bullying victimization with deficits in social competence, powerlessness, peer rejection, depression, anxiety, withdrawal, and poor academic performance [
7]. Experiencing bullying in childhood is also linked to higher reports of depression, decreased academic achievement, and truancy with negative impact on child development [
22]. Blacks and Asian students report higher incidence of perceived BBB with subcategories of racism, hate speech, and hate-related harassment (8–10%) than white students (5%) [
26]. Long term effects of implicit BBB on maternal health have been linked to postpartum depression for mothers who identify as Black, even after typical social determinants such as low education and lack of physical resources (ie food and housing) were controlled [
28]. In contrast, one cross-sectional study of 3956 children’s data taken from Longitudinal Study of Australian Children Data Base (LSAC), reports a higher incidence of bullying victimization in white, Australian–New Zealand-born parents compared to “Visible Minorities” and describes “racial discrimination” as distinct from “bullying” reports [
25]. However, this study fails to provide a clear sample designation for the pseudo-categories of stratified groups that were used to determine minority compared to non-minority samples. The authors extracted data from the LSAC Report on parental country of origin, which reported sample categories of “Minority” and “White/Caucasian/Non-Minority” according to parental country of origin (Born in Australia or New Zealand compared to parents born “Overseas”) rather than self-reported minority identification. Furthermore, the authors failed to acknowledge the fact that many Australian and New Zealand born parents may also identify as “minorities” and would not be included in the “white” subgroup for analysis. Overall, the study by Priest et al. [
25], may need further examination regarding sample homogeneity and identification of subgroup minority categories, as well as a larger subgroup sample size for future study pseudo-minority category to be generalizable (77.5% (n = 3026) of the sample reported having parents who were born in Australia or New Zealand and 22.5% (n = 889) reported parental country of birth as overseas). …
