Pediatrics & Therapeutics
Open Access

Abstract

Does Childhood Physical Punishment Predispose to a Victim Personality

Kaj Björkqvist and Karin Österman

Background: In a previous study, victimization to childhood physical punishment (CPP) was found to be a risk factor for becoming also a victim of school bullying. This finding was replicated and investigated further in two separate studies with adolescents as subjects.
Study I: Finnish adolescents (N=1,247, 611 girls, 636 boys; M age=14.0, SD=0.9 yrs) served as subjects in a quantitative self report survey. A relationship was found between CPP and victimization to both traditional bullying and cyber aggression, but also between CPP and perpetration of cyber aggression. The finding prompted the need to include measures of perpetration of traditional school aggression into the study design.
Study II: In a follow-up survey (N=620, 296 girls, 324 boys; M age=13.1, SD=1.6 yrs), CPP was found to correlate with victimization to all measured forms of school aggression (physical, verbal, indirect, cyber), but also with perpetration of all of these.
Discussion: The results suggest that CPP may predispose to not only victimization but also to perpetration of school aggression. Different trajectories and intervening variables need to be investigated in future research.