Bullying and its Effects on Mental Health among Students of a Senior Secondary School in Banjul, The Gambia

Introduction: Bullying in schools is a global phenomenon associated with multiple physical and mental health problems that last into adulthood. Analysis by UNICEF in 2022 showed that 89% of Gambian children experienced violence such as bullying, sexual abuse and psychological aggression. There is however dearth of studies on bullying and mental health problems amongst Gambian students. This study was conducted to determine the prevalence of bullying and its effects on mental health of students in a senior secondary school in Banjul, The Gambia Methodology: This was a cross-sectional study conducted among 167 senior secondary students in Banjul who met the inclusion criteria. A simple random sampling technique was used for the selection of participants. The tools used for the study were the socio-demographic questionnaire, the Adolescent Peer Relations Instrument (APRI), the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and Socio-demographic Questionnaire. The socio-demographic characteristics of the participants were summarized using descriptive statistics, including means and standard deviations for continuous variables. Categorical variables were presented using bar charts, frequencies and percentage distributions. For the bivariate analysis, Fisher’s exact test was employed to examine the association between bullying and mental health. A significance level of P<0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULT: In all, 167 students participated in the study with mean age (SD) of 17.0(2.31) years with majorly (77.8%) in the age range of 17-19 years. The participants were predominantly females (76.6%). Overall, the prevalence of bullying among the participants was 89.8%. Among the 167 students recruited for the study, only 9(5.3%) did not report bully or victim behaviors. There were 17(10.2%) bullies, 8(4.8%) victims and 133(79.6%) of students who were bully-victims. Verbal bullying was the most common form of bullying perpetrated by 86.8% of the participants with 20.3% being purely verbal bullying while 66.5% were in combination with other subtypes. Similarly, verbal bullying was the commonest form reported by 81.4% of the victims. The most common combination was of all 3 subtypes (verbal+social+physical) which were reported by 40.5% of bully perpetuators and 58.2% among the victims of bullying. Among the participants, 64.7% reported having difficulties affecting their activities at classroom, home, friendship and leisure activities with 6.6% reporting the difficulties to be severe while 22.8% stated that they had experienced these difficulties for over one year. Also, 52.1% had substantial clinical risk of developing mental health problems. Among the participants, all (100%) the victims of bullying had mental health problems compared to those who were not victims (P<0.05). Conclusion: The experience and manifestation of bullying behaviors was highly prevalent among the senior secondary school students in Banjul. Mental health problems were experienced by many of the victims of bullying. A firm anti-bullying policy and the development of school mental health programs will help to reduce the incidence of bullying and aid early identification and intervention for students with mental health challenges.