Which races have the most bullies? An article giving an answer to this question has recently been published by three British psychologists in a study lead by Dr Neil Tippett. They defined bullying as “aggressive behaviour, engaged in repeatedly, by an individual or group of peers with more, actual or perceived, power than the victim”. The study assessed racial differences in bullying in a British sample of 4668 adolescents, assessed by self-report answers to questions such as “Do you physically bully other children at school by hitting or pushing them around, threatening or stealing their things?” The results were expressed as odds ratios with the rate for whites set at 1.0 and showed that bullying is greatest in South Asians at 2.59 times the rate of whites, next greatest in blacks at 2.2 times the rate of whites, and lowest for East Asians (largely Chinese) in blacks at 0.93 times the rate of whites. The results confirm previous studies showing that in Britain, blacks have higher rates of aggression than whites and Chinese lower rates than whites, but the high rates of South Asians are anomalous.
