8.6% of Catalan schoolchildren believe that they are often bullied at schoolwhich is more than 2 points higher than the Spanish average (6.5%) and 3.6 points higher than students from the Community of Madrid (5%).

This is reflected in the Integrated Student Assessment Program Report (PISA) 2022, published this week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), compiled by Europa Press, which involved 30,800 fifteen-year-old students in Spain in 966 schools and a total of about 690,000 students.

The new PISA report, prepared every three years by the OECD, states that Students from La Rioja suffer the least amount of bullying in Spain.where 4.1% say they often suffer from it, Castile and Leon (4.2%) and the Community of Madrid (5%), while those most affected by bullying are residents of the Canary Islands (10.2%), Catalonia (8. 6%). ) and Galicia (8.5%), which are the only three autonomous communities that exceed the national average (6.5%).

In the Autonomous Cities, 12.6% of students in Melilla believe they are often bullied at school, compared to 10.7% in Ceuta.

However, PISA 2022 indicates that all Autonomous Communities show negative values ​​for the Bullying Exposure Index among fifteen-year-old students, including La Rioja (-0.55), Extremadura (-0.51), Foral Community of Navarra (-0.50 ). and Castile and Leon (-0.50), the four communities with the lowest levels of exposure to harassment. In contrast, Melilla (-0.20), Catalonia (-0.21) and the Canary Islands (-0.21) are the autonomous communities and cities whose students are most at risk.

The report explains that bullying and harassment is a widespread problem with serious consequences for the lives of students who suffer from it. Thus, he adds that stalking is a special type of aggressive behavior in which a person or group of people intentionally and repeatedly harms and inconveniences another person.

According to PISA, bullying is characterized by systematic abuse of power and unequal power relationships between the bully or bullies and the victim. Bullying can be physical (punching and kicking), verbal (insults and teasing), and relational (spreading hoaxes and engaging in other forms of public humiliation and social exclusion).

The document warns that with the widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT), cyberbullying has become another type of bullying among students that is carried out through digital devices and tools. In many cases, all of these forms of persecution occur simultaneously.

Korea and Japan are the countries with the least frequent bullying

The countries with the lowest percentage of frequently harassed students are Korea (1.1%) and Japan (3.7%), which are below 5% of frequently harassed students, compared to countries with a higher percentage of students, Cyprus (14.1 %) and Australia. (14.1%), above 14%.

Spain (6.5%) is among the countries with a lower percentage of frequently bullied students, 1.8 percentage points below the OECD average (8.3%).

PISA 2022 ensures that boys are more likely to be bullied than girls. They are also more likely to engage in physical violence, and girls tend to engage more in relational aggression.

In most countries, boys are significantly more likely than girls to be classified as being frequently bullied, and typically report bullying at least several times a month.

The study also highlights that being the target of harassment is usually linked to the socio-economic status of students. In most countries selected in this report, including Spain (-0.15), students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are significantly more likely to experience any type of bullying than students from advantaged backgrounds.

Similarly, PISA warns that bullying between native and immigrant students is a “concern” among policymakers as well as all members of the educational community, “as it can have a profound impact, for example, on relationships between immigrant and non-immigrant groups in adulthood .

On average across OECD countries, immigrant students experience significantly more bullying than non-immigrant students. In thirteen countries, including Spain (-0.18), students of immigrant origin were significantly more likely to be bullied than native students.

However, in the US, Canada, Australia, UK (0.15), Costa Rica (0.10) and New Zealand (0.09), native-born students experience bullying at significantly higher rates than those who have already been bullied by immigrants.