Students’ Feeling of Safety in School: Does Frequency of Victimization Matter?

One consistent finding in the area of school violence is that students that have been victimized at school are more likely to feel unsafe. This finding is based primarily on analysis of dichotomous measures of victimization. Little attention has been given to the effect of repeated victimization experiences on the feeling of safety. We used a nationally representative sample of 2199 Israeli Jewish and Arab students to explore this issue with reference to multiple experiences with the same type of victimization as well as experiences with different types of school violence. Our study confirms that being a victim of school violence decreases the feeling of safety, but suggests that a single experience may be more significant for this relationship than multiple victimizations.