Bullying is not limited to work or school. It also happens between brothers and sisters. And with bullying I’m not talking about the sort of teasing that often goes on within families. No bulling are incidents that occur several times a week, in which victims are ignored by their brothers or sisters, or are subjected to verbal or physical violence. And this can have a big impact in later life. A new study, published in Pediatrics, has found that children who revealed they had been bullied by their brothers or sisters several times a week or more during early adolescence were twice as likely to report being clinically depressed as young adults. They were also twice as likely to say they had self-harmed within the previous year compared with those who had not been bullied.
From the press release:
Children of women who enrolled in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) in the 1990s took part in the research. Nearly 7,000 children, aged 12, completed postal questionnaires in 2003-4 about whether they had experienced any form of sibling bullying and if so, how often it happened.
The same children were followed up at the age of 18 years, so their mental health could be assessed using a validated online questionnaire, known as the Clinical Interview Schedule. The teenagers attended a clinic to fill in the questionnaire that asked them about their feelings and any recent self-harming behaviour.
Of the 3,452 children with information on both sibling bullying and psychiatric outcomes, 1,810 said they had not been bullied by a brother or sister. Of these, 6.4% had depression scores in the clinically significant range, 9.3% experienced anxiety and 7.6% had self-harmed in the previous year. Of the 786 children who said they had been bullied by a sibling several times a week, clinical depression was reported by 12.3%, 14% had self-harmed in the previous year and 16% of them reported anxiety.
The link between being bullied by their siblings as a child and later mental health disorders was found to be similar for both boys and girls.
Victims were more likely to be girls than boys, with this form of bullying more common in families where there were three or more children. Older brothers were often the perpetrators. On average, victims reported that sibling bullying had started at the age of eight.
Abstract of the study:
OBJECTIVES: Being the victim of peer bullying is associated with increased risk of psychopathology, yet it is not known whether similar experiences of bullying increase risk of psychiatric disorder when the perpetrator is a sibling. We tested whether being bullied by a sibling is prospectively associated with depression, anxiety, and self-harm in early adulthood.
METHODS: We conducted a longitudinal study using data from >6900 participants of a UK community-based birth cohort (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) who reported on sibling bullying at 12 years. Our main outcome measures were depression, anxiety, and self-harm, assessed using the Clinical Interview Schedule–Revised during clinic assessments when participants were 18.
RESULTS: Children who were frequently bullied were approximately twice as likely to have depression (odds ratio [OR] = 2.16; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.33–3.51; P < .001), self-harm (OR = 2.56; 95% CI, 1.63–4.02; P < .001), and anxiety (OR = 1.83; 95% CI, 1.19–2.81; P < .001) as children who were not bullied by siblings. The ORs were only slightly attenuated after adjustment for a range of confounding individual, family, and peer factors. The population-attributable fractions suggested that 13.0% (95% CI, 1.0%–24.7%) of depression and 19.3% (95% CI, 7.6%–29.6%) of self-harm could be explained by being the victim of sibling bullying if these were causal relationships.
CONCLUSIONS: Being bullied by a sibling is a potential risk factor for depression and self-harm in early adulthood. Our results suggest that interventions designed to target sibling bullying should be devised and evaluated.