With the nation still appalled by the shocking bullying-suicide case in Daegu, all kinds of stories related to bullying and teenage violence have been vastly more prominent in the media than they were just two weeks ago. The list of featured articles in the society section of Naver now has several related articles each day, so I’m going to be translating a large batch of them starting with this one.

Original article in Korean is at this link.

48% of our teenagers have been the victims of school violence, and the more frequent the violence the more thoughts of suicide become common, a study has found.

On the 6th, Kim Jae-yeop, a Yonsei University professor of sociology and social welfare, announced the results of the survey of 1,140 middle and high school students in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do.

According to the study, 48% of teenagers said they had experienced school violence during the past year and 42.3% had had thoughts of suicide during the previous week.

Using path-coefficient analysis through average value and standard deviation, the study found correlations between school violence and depression (β=0.086), depression and thoughts of suicide (β=0.070), and thus school violence and thoughts of suicide (β=0.034).

Teenagers who experience violence at school experience more depression the more violence they experience, and depression influences thoughts of suicide, the study concluded.

Also, the respondents were more likely to have thoughts of suicide linked to depression if they frequently drank alcohol in groups (β=0.758) than if they did so infrequently (β=0.657).

This means that teenage drinking is influenced by attempts to deal with stress, the study said.

Prof. Kim’s research team published its study last October through BK21.

The research team said: “Because school violence leads directly to thoughts of suicide and serious stress incidents, we must discover it early and intervene to prevent it in order to reduce thoughts of suicide.”