By Akemi Tamanaha

Often, Asian Americans teenagers are left out of broader conversations about bullying. On Monday, the Asian American Journal of Psychology published a quantitative study on how schools play a role in the victimization of Asian American teenagers. One of its goals is to help quantify the victimization and bullying Asian American teens experience because of their race; experiences of Asian American teens like Sam who spoke to AsAmNews.

Sam’s Experience

Two years ago, Sam graduated from college and moved from a small town to the big city to make music. He lives and works in a city that reflects America’s vibrant cultural diversity.



That cultural diversity was not always present in Sam’s home town. Several years ago much of his sense of community was defined by a private middle school with mostly affluent White students. Sam was one of the few students of color attending the school on scholarship.



Like many middle schoolers, Sam was a victim of teenage bullying and teasing. Unlike many of his peers, however, the bullying Sam experienced related to his race. One male student would slant his eyes at Sam, call him racial slurs, and yell “ching-chong.”



One day, Sam decided he had had enough. No one ever spoke to him about the incident, and from that moment on Sam and the student in question remained friendly.



“To be clear, I’m pretty ashamed of what I did,” Sam told AsAmNews. “In hindsight it was a needless act of violence.”

The study’s beginnings

It was a story of Asian Americans attempting to fight back against their bullies, told in NPR’s podcast Code Switch, that inspired Professor Kevin Gee and his colleague Professor North Cooc of UT Austin to conduct their study.



In 2009, several Asian American students reported being beaten up by their peers at a high school in South Philadelphia. The students claimed that the school did nothing when they reported the physical harassment. The federal government would later claim that the school “deliberately ignored” the rising racial tensions that contributed to the bullying of those Asian American students.



“I think the disturbing thing is these are people who took their concerns to people who are supposed to protect them, and they did nothing,” Professor Gee said.



Professor Gee and Professor Cooc began to wonder what schools were doing to protect Asian Americans students against bullying. They also wondered what might be happening in schools that might increase the victimization of Asian American students.



To answer these questions, took multiple years of data from a subset of the National Crime Victimization survey. The School Crime Supplement asked adolescents about their perceptions of crime and safety at school. Professor Gee and Professor Cooc took multiple years of data to ensure that they had a large enough sample size, an issue that often plagues research on Asian American communities.



“A lot of research on Asian Americans gets dinged because there are small samples…” Professor Gee said. “I think it says a lot about how we think about data on Asian Americans and why we need to collect larger samples and also thinking about disaggregating Asian Ams.”



Their study does not disaggregate Asian Americans by ethnicity, but they hope to eventually collect enough data in future research to do so.



Importance of social context in the victimization of Asian American Teens

According to the study, Asian American teenagers most frequently experienced social victimization (15%) as opposed to physical victimization (4%).

The study unearthed three main relationships. First, Asian American teens with more peer support experience less physical victimization. Second, teens who engage in physical fights or attend schools with a strong gang presence experience more social victimization.



Finally, the study found that commonplace school security measures like metal detectors, locker checks, or school conduct codes make no difference in the level of victimization Asian American teenagers experience. The social context of the school was really what was driving the victimization. Researchers need to examine the racial dynamics and implicit biases not just among students, but also the school staff and faculty.



According to Professor Gee, the need to examine the social context of schools is one of the biggest takeaways from the study.



“I think those are the more complicated conversations to have,” Professor Gee said.



The study did examine social interventions that are designed to help students make friends and get support from adults. Professor Gee said that the problem with these interventions is they tend to work best for White students. Socially based interventions, he says, should consider the diverse school settings they are being implemented in.



“And that’s difficult, to sort of take a step back and say if an Asian American student comes to me and reports bullying how might I have my own implicit assumptions about that relative to other students,” Professor Gee said.



Continuing Thoughtful Data Collection

Professor Gee says the next step in their research is qualitative. Researchers need to sit down with Asian American teenagers and ask them about their experiences with victimization and bullying. Both Professor Gee and Professor Cooc hope that this study will encourage researchers to continue conducting thoughtful data collection on Asian Americans.



Thoughtful data collection can also be done in schools, Professor Gee says. Schools could conduct their own surveys and interviews to better understand the social dynamics of their school.



You can learn more about Asian American victimization and bullying on the Asian Pacific American website. You can also read a report published by the Asian American Pacific Islander Bullying Prevention Task Force.



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