Bullying behavior continues to be a salient social and health-related issue of importance to educators, criminal justice practitioners, and academicians across the country. While discourse on school bullying is abundant, previous studies are limited in explaining the predictive effect of factors such as individual/demographic variables, school environmental variables, and school antibullying preventive measures. Using a nationally representative sample of 12,987 private and public school students in the United States, the current study examines school safety measures and students’ perceptions about school environments (or climate), especially school rules and punishment. Findings reveal that the variables of security guards, fairness and awareness of school rules, gangs and guns at school, students misbehaving, and teachers’ punishment of students were statistically significant predictors of bullying victimization. Implications of these findings for school anti-bullying programs as well as directions for future research are discussed. 1. Introduction In recent decades, school bullying and victimization, which continues to be a serious social and health problem in the United States, has received extraordinary levels of attention from the public, criminal justice practitioners, academicians, and educators [1–3]. A significant number of empirical studies indicate that bullying and victimization is an increasing problem on school grounds and one that has negative consequences for both bullies and their victims [3–8]. For example, the School Crime Supplement survey (2007) showed that 32 percent of students reported being bullied at school, while only 28 percent of students in 2005 reported being bullied [9]. Recently, Dinkes et al. [10] found that 75 percent of US public school principals indicated that schools reported one or more violent incidents to the police, and 25 percent of public schools reported school bullying on a daily/weekly basis. Numerous studies [11–15] also document that school bullying is physically and psychologically detrimental to the victims. Limited empirical studies [16–22] have examined predictors of bullying victimization, and few have focused on individual and school-related factors. Yet these studies found that individual demographic factors (e.g., age, gender, and race) and school characteristics (e.g., presence of gangs at school, and police/school staff members’ supervision) are significantly related to victimization. For example, a study by DeVoe et al. [17] found that victims of school bullying are more likely to be younger
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