California Data Sheds Light on Bullying of Gay Youth

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, and a recent bullying-related suicide by a New Jersey college student is a tragic reminder of how devastating bullying can be.

Several recent bullying victims making national headlines were children and young adults bullied due to their sexual orientation. In fact, there has been so much outcry that a YouTube campaign has started to support the victims.

Kidsdata.org offers data on this subject.

Kidsdata.org has student-reported data from the California Healthy Kids Survey noting how many times students in 7^th, 9^th and 11^th grades, and in non-traditional programs, report being bullied due to their sexual orientation. These data are available for counties and school districts across California, and also are broken out by race/ethnicity and level of connectedness to school.

According to the 06-08 data, more than 5 percent of 7^th-grade boys in California reported being bullied four times or more in the past year because they were gay or because someone thought they were gay; 2.5 percent of 7^th-grade girls said the same. Overall, 10 percent of 7th-grade girls and 12 percent of boys report being bullied at least once in the past year due to sexual orientation.

We also offer data about bullying reports for other reasons. Bullying and Harassment due to:

• Disability
• Gender
• Race or National Origin
• Religion
• Any other reason

Tags: Child Health Issues

Posted by Felicity Simmons

This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at 1:18 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.