Intersections of gender and sexual minority status: Co-occurring bullying victimization among adolescents

The present study refined existing bullying literature by examining differences in risk of three types of bullying victimization (offline only, cyberbullying only, and co-occurring victimization) for four different gender-sexual minority status groups using data generated from high-school aged adolescents in the United States. We used data from two years (2011 and 2013) of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) to obtain a final sample of 91,588 individual cases for evaluation with multinomial regression. Generally, results suggest that adolescents who are outside a normal body weight and those belonging to a sexual minority face increased risks of offline and co-occurring victimization. Results also revealed that observed differences in risk of victimization are often significantly different across gender-sexual minority status groups leading to disparities in risk for male and female adolescents depending on whether they identify as a sexual minority.