Bullying Leaves a Mark: Massive 15-Country Study Reveals How Unsafe Schools Erode Teen Well-Being

A new study published in Frontiers in Public Health has examined how bullying victimization is associated with the emotional well-being of adolescents, using one of the largest datasets ever assembled for this purpose. Drawing on responses from 15-year-olds across 15 education systems that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the research analyzed how experiences of bullying relate not only to how teenagers feel but also to how safe they perceive their schools to be. The findings suggest that bullying is linked to lower emotional well-being and lower perceived school safety, and that supportive school climates may buffer some of these effects.

The study, led by Millicent Azikiwe, analyzed data from the 2022 cycle of the PISA assessment, which surveyed students in 15 countries and economies. The research focused on the relationships among bullying victimization, perceived school safety, school belonging, teacher support, and emotional well-being. Using structural equation modeling, the researchers tested a framework in which bullying was expected to undermine well-being both directly and indirectly, by eroding students’ sense of safety and connection at school.

The results showed that bullying victimization was negatively associated with emotional well-being, meaning that students who reported more frequent bullying tended to report lower well-being. Bullying was also negatively associated with perceived school safety, suggesting that bullied students felt less safe in their schools. In turn, perceived school safety was positively associated with emotional well-being, as were school belonging and teacher support, indicating that safer and more supportive school climates were linked to better well-being among adolescents.

One of the more notable findings concerned gender differences. The association between bullying victimization and school belonging was stronger among female students than among male students, suggesting that bullying may undermine girls’ sense of connection at school more powerfully. However, the direct association between bullying and emotional well-being did not differ significantly by gender, implying that both boys and girls experience the emotional toll of bullying, even if the relational consequences differ.

The study also found that teacher support was positively associated with school belonging, suggesting that supportive teacher-student relationships may help students feel more connected to their schools. Perceived school safety was likewise positively associated with school belonging, indicating that students who felt safe were more likely to feel they belonged. These findings align with the study’s framework, in which school climate factors were expected to relate to one another and to well-being.

The researchers emphasized that their findings have implications for school policies aimed at promoting adolescent well-being. Because bullying was linked to lower well-being and lower perceived safety, schools may need to address bullying not only as a disciplinary issue but also as a threat to students’ emotional health. At the same time, because school safety, belonging, and teacher support were all positively associated with well-being, schools may be able to promote resilience by strengthening these supportive climate factors.

The study’s use of PISA data gives it considerable breadth, as the assessment covers students in a wide range of countries and economies. However, the researchers noted some limitations. Because the data are cross-sectional, the findings cannot establish causality, and it remains possible that students with lower well-being are more likely to perceive or report bullying. The researchers also noted that the PISA survey measures perceptions, which may differ from objective experiences of bullying or school climate.

Despite these limitations, the study adds to a growing body of evidence linking bullying to poorer mental health among adolescents. Previous research has shown that bullying victimization is associated with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, and that supportive school climates can mitigate some of these effects. The new findings extend this evidence by showing that bullying may undermine well-being both directly and indirectly, by eroding students’ sense of safety and connection at school.

The researchers concluded that their findings underscore the importance of addressing bullying as a public health concern, particularly in light of the emotional toll it takes on adolescents. They suggested that schools may benefit from policies that simultaneously reduce bullying and strengthen supportive school climates, including safe environments, strong teacher-student relationships, and a sense of belonging. Such approaches, they argued, may promote the emotional well-being of adolescents across diverse educational contexts.

The methodological backbone of the study deserves closer attention, because the way the analysis was conducted shapes how much confidence readers can place in its conclusions. Rather than treating every student response as if it carried equal weight, the researchers employed survey-adjusted hierarchical regression analyses that incorporated Balanced Repeated Replication weights. This approach matters because PISA uses complex sampling designs in which schools and students are not selected with equal probability. Replication-based variance estimation allows the analysis to account for this clustering and stratification, producing standard errors that better reflect the true sampling variability within each education system. In practical terms, this means the reported associations are less likely to be statistical artifacts of the sampling design, a concern that has undermined some earlier cross-national studies of school climate.

The sheer scale of the dataset also warrants comment. With 135,348 adolescents distributed across 15 education systems, the study draws on one of the largest samples ever brought to bear on questions of bullying and school climate. Large multinational samples of this kind offer advantages that smaller single-school or single-country studies cannot: they capture considerable variation in how bullying is experienced, how safe students feel, and how supportive their teachers are perceived to be. This heterogeneity increases the likelihood that the observed patterns reflect processes that generalize across rather different educational and cultural contexts, rather than idiosyncrasies of one national system. At the same time, pooling across systems can mask meaningful between-country differences, and the study’s aggregate findings should be read as broad patterns rather than guarantees that every education system behaves identically.

The theoretical framing of the work draws on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, which holds that human development emerges from the interplay between individuals and the nested environments they inhabit. Applied to adolescence, this perspective treats emotional well-being not as a fixed individual trait but as a condition shaped by ongoing interactions with peers, teachers, and the broader institutional climate of the school. Within this framework, each variable in the study occupies a distinct ecological position: bullying victimization represents a harmful peer-level experience, perceived school safety reflects the environmental climate, school belonging captures social integration, teacher support represents adult relational support, and emotional well-being indexes psychosocial adjustment. This integrated framing is what distinguishes the study from earlier research that examined these factors in isolation from one another.

The gender findings merit particular reflection in light of prior developmental research. Existing scholarship suggests that female adolescents tend to place greater value on interpersonal relationships and that their emotional states are more closely tied to social connectedness than is the case for male adolescents. The stronger association between bullying victimization and school belonging among female students in this study is consistent with that picture, hinting that relational forms of harm may cut more deeply into girls’ sense of connection to their school community. Yet the absence of a gender difference in the bullying–well-being association is equally instructive. It suggests that while the relational pathway may differ, the emotional consequences of victimization are broadly shared across genders, which argues against well-being interventions that target only one group of students.

It is also worth situating these results within the wider literature on the consequences of peer victimization. Previous studies have repeatedly linked bullying to anxiety, depressive symptoms, loneliness, low self-esteem, school disengagement, and even suicidal ideation, and have documented inverse associations across verbal, relational, physical, and sexual forms of bullying. Earlier work has also highlighted school connectedness as a potential protective resource that can buffer the psychological distress associated with peer victimization. The present study builds on this foundation by placing safety, belonging, and teacher support within a single analytical framework, allowing their relative contributions to be examined side by side rather than in separate analyses.

From a public health standpoint, the findings carry implications that extend beyond individual classrooms. Adolescent emotional well-being is shaped not only by direct experiences of victimization but also by the broader perceptions of social and environmental support that students carry with them through the school day. If perceived safety, belonging, and teacher support are each positively associated with well-being, then interventions that strengthen any one of these climate dimensions may yield benefits even where bullying itself is difficult to eliminate entirely. Whole-school approaches that combine anti-bullying policies with efforts to build trusting teacher-student relationships and inclusive peer cultures would be consistent with this integrated evidence base.

Finally, some caution is warranted when interpreting associations drawn from a single wave of survey data. Because all measures were collected at the same point in time, the direction of influence between bullying, safety perceptions, belonging, and well-being cannot be definitively established. Students who feel worse emotionally may, for example, be more inclined to interpret ambiguous peer behavior as bullying or to rate their school climate more negatively. Moreover, PISA captures students’ perceptions rather than objectively verified incidents, and perceptions can diverge from documented events. Longitudinal designs and multi-informant measures would help clarify these dynamics, and future research building on this framework could track how school-climate perceptions and victimization experiences unfold together over the course of adolescence.

Subject of Research: Bullying victimization and school climate in relation to adolescent emotional well-being

Article Title: When school feels unsafe: bullying victimization, school climate, and adolescent emotional well-being

Article References: Aziku, M. (2026). When school feels unsafe: bullying victimization, school climate, and adolescent emotional well-being. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, Article 1929270. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1929270

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1929270

Keywords: bullying, victimization, adolescents, emotional well-being, school safety, school belonging, teacher support, school climate, PISA 2022, gender differences, public health, Frontiers in Public Health