Chapter 10: Gifted Or Cursed: Are Gifted Students More Victimized Than Their Non-Gifted Peers?

The most accepted and used definition of school bullying is the one formulated by Olweus (1993). This author states, among other aspects, that a student is being bullied when another student (or a group of students) performs a behavior (physical, verbal, social, or psychological) to make the victim suffer and which is maintained over time. Moreover, there is an inequality of power between the bully (or bullies) and the victim, which implies the victims’ impossibility to defend themselves. To form a general idea of the prevalence of the problem, we mention the work of Modecki et al. (2014), a meta-analysis obtained from 80 studies, where the average prevalence rate was 35% for bullying perpetration and 36% for victimization. These data have been corroborated by subsequent reviews (Zych et al., 2015). Bullying and victimization rates are generally higher for boys than for girls (Smith et al., 2019), although this aspect is under debate. It also appears that students in primary education report more victimization than in secondary education or subsequent post-compulsory stages (Zych et al., 2015).