Bullying among Roma Children of a Cluj Metropolitan Area School

Background: Bullying occurs mostly in schools, having destructive psychologically and physically long-term effects. This study has a research and psycho-social intervention approach. The purpose of research was to investigate whether Roma children were more exposed to bullying situations in school than Romanian children. The research had a pre-intervention component, designed to inform the intervention, and a post-intervention component, serving an assessment purpose.

Methods: This study was conducted in a primary classroom of a secondary school from Cluj metropolitan area, where 23% of the school population were Roma pupils. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 pupils and 7 parents of Roma and Romanian ethnicity, and with 3 teachers during May-June 2022. Thematic analysis was used to investigate the qualitative data. A sociogram explored the attraction and rejection relationships between Roma and Romanian classmates. Following the research, a psycho-educational group was conducted with the pupils of the investigated classroom. The Paired-samples t Test was applied to investigate whether pupils improved their level of knowledge about bullying at the end of intervention.

Results: The findings showed that school was not a discriminatory bullying environment based on ethnicity. Physical and verbal forms of bullying prevailed in school. A significantly higher level of knowledge about bullying was evidenced at the end of intervention. The group leader informed parents about bullying and conceived a step-by-step intervention plan with the teacher to suppress bullying between pupils. Conclusions: Further directions of research and intervention to address bullying are exposed in the last section of the study.


Keywords: discriminatory bullying, primary school, Roma pupils, prevention program, Romania