Poor Hygiene and Bullying Victimization in Pakistan

Background and Purpose

Bullying has perhaps best been defined by Olweus as “negative actions” to which students are exposed to “repeatedly and over time” by “one or more other students” (1) which Dulmus and colleagues have broken down into three related concepts: i) the intention to hurt or harm, ii) the occurrence of the harmful behavior repeatedly over time, and iii) the imbalance of power between the bully and the victim of bullying (2).

            Bullying has been examined widely in high-income countries, where the incidence of bullying victimization range from 5 to 57% (3). Fewer studies are based on low-to-middle income countries. In a study that includes Pakistan, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, bullying victimization was experienced by 37.5% of the sample (4).

            A large section of the literature focus on power imbalances between those who are bullied and those who bully. Langdon and Preble found that perceived respect from both adults and peers were significantly correlated with reports of bullying, indicating that power imbalances can perhaps be transformed by inculcating respect (5).

            Building upon Langdon and Preble’s work but from the opposite direction, we examine whether issues that elicit disrespect may increase an individual’s chances of being bullied, linking it to Curtis and Biran’s 2001 study that found poor hygiene to be widely accepted as an elicitor of disgust (6). 

            We hypothesize that poor hygiene is associated with increased bullying victimization. This is in line with scholars who argue that students who are deemed “different” are more likely to experience bullying victimization. For example Son and colleagues found that students with disabilities were more likely to be bullied than students without disabilities (7).

Study Design

This study utilized the Global School-Based Health Surveys (GSHS) of 4,997 students from Pakistan. All students who responded to the questions on bullying and hygiene as well as the control variables were included in the study, which include parental involvement (8, 9), close friendships (10) and demographic variables (11, 12). A listwise deletion of missing values were conducted to account for missing data. A two-staged cluster sampling strategy was used to generate nationally representative samples of school children between the ages of 11 and 16 from grades eight, nine, and ten. 

            Sample characteristics were computed based on population estimates. Bivariate and multivariate examinations followed. We computed prevalence ratios using Poisson regression to determine the association between experiencing bullying and the symptoms of depression.

Results

About one-third (N=1,880) of the study population reported to experience bullying victimization, while about one-fourth (N=1,302) reported to have poor hygiene. The multivariate model indicated that those with good hygiene had lower propensity of reporting bullying victimization (PR=0.98, p<0.05).

Conclusions and Implications

 

The study highlights that poor hygiene is not only directly related to poor health due to higher exposure to infectious diseases as extant research show, but it is related to higher risk of experiencing bullying victimization, highlighting a link between structural problems (hygiene) and interpersonal ones (bullying victimization).