Gender, Body Image and Mental Health Risks of Bullying in U.S. High Schools: A Study of State Anti-Bullying Laws from Survey Data

As of today, all 50 states and District of Columbia have enacted Anti-Bullying Laws (ABLs)
to protect students from being bullied. Yet there is still limited evidence on whether such policies
can effectively reduce the frequency and severity of bullying on school grounds, especially for
those students with high-risk of being bullied. Moreover, several previous studies have indicated
that students with negative self-perceived body image are more likely to be victims of bullying
activities. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of ABLs on U.S high school students
from Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) and School Health Profiles (SHP) under
difference-in-difference model framework. The school-level estimates from SHP suggest that ABLs
increase the probability of school staff devoting their effort towards healthy anti-bullying climate
by 1.9 percentage points and receiving more professional developments by 5.9 percentage points.
Yet, the student-level analysis on YRBSS supports the statement that state ABLs have limited
effect on high school students' mental health and suicide ideation across different gender and body-
image classes. But results also imply that ABLs with certain components (Training/Prevention,
Communication and Prohibited Behaviors) can signicantly reduce female students' mental health
issues (1.9-6.6 percentage points) and suicide ideation of male students with negative body image
(10.9-11.4 percentage points) compared to other state ABLs. Falsication test using Behavioral
Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) on which the anti-bullying laws should not have an
impact, verfies the robustness of results form YRBSS analysis.