Why is one child more vulnerable to being bullied than another? It turns out that genes play a greater role in this than home and school environments. Something that happens to you can be hereditary.
Elsje van Bergen works at the Netherlands Twin Register, which is part of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has studied the relationship between bullying behaviour and genetics. Her research examines the causes of various forms of bullying behaviour as well as the relationship between bullying perpetration and bullying victimization.
About 1 in 3 children have experience with bullying behaviour: 1 in 4 as bully , 1 in 4 as victim, and 1 in 7 as both perpetrator and victim. Children who are unsure as to whether they look ‘different’ than the rest of the class are at greater risk of being bullied.
Genetics partly determines whether or not a child experiences bullying. However, some things can also be done to prevent bullying behaviour.
Twin studies are used to investigate whether behaviour is hereditary. Identical twins have the same genetic material and fraternal twins share an average of 50%. The researchers saw that identical twins were more similar in their experience of bullying behaviour than fraternal twins, which is due to the influence of genes.
Two-thirds of the differences between children in bullying (or being bullied) can be attributed to genetic differences. A child whose parents or siblings have been bullied is at increased risk of being bullied. The child shares half of its genes with each of them.
Twins run the same risk of bullying as non-twins. In addition, girls who are twins are less likely to be bullied when they are in a class together.