1. Introduction
Nowadays, in our society, we detect problematic and complex situations to solve that occur—above all—in the educational field and imply the disadvantage of some students in respect to others. Among these types of situations, we can highlight bullying, which can be defined as the act of violence that people exert against each other repeatedly over time and whose basis sustains an imbalance of power [
1].
As in other fields, a new era is also opening up for the world of violence in the classroom because of the use of information and communication technologies [
2]. The bad intention, sometimes with which students can use the internet and mobile phones, generates a new type of aggression called cyberbullying [
3]. All these aspects of violence are beginning to be considered a major public health problem [
4], specifically for children [
5], sometimes generating adverse behavior [
6] and even leading to suicidal behavior in young people [
7].
The variants that can be found in this type of harassment are very diverse, and no specific profile can be established [
8]. Even so, different signs shown by the victims can be indicators of cyberbullying. The signs we are talking about are aspects that victims externalize when they are immersed in a situation of harassment, such as depression, anxiety, or anger, understood as internal problems to the subject, or external elements such as aggression or the use of narcotic substances [
9].
Other signs the victims usually show are: reduced physical activity [
10], decreased sleep duration [
11], low self-esteem, difficulties in social skills [
12], poor body image, poor eating habits [
13], and consumption of alcoholic beverages [
14]. More specifically, subjects who suffer cyberbullying tend to have mental health problems, engage in substance abuse, become overweight, and use video games for three or more hours a day [
15].
As with certain minorities, ethnic minorities are prone to being harassment victims [
16], more so for first-generation immigrants than second-generation ones [
17]. It is difficult to determine group differences in harassment actions [
18]. There are factors such as ethnic identity that do have a direct influence [
19], and even other factors such as the existence of low or very low socio-economic and cultural status [
20]. In addition, an association is identified between the state of racial harassment and drug use [
21]. Those who receive ethnic harassment have weak self-control, prefer to use external coping mechanisms and give up easily, experience loneliness, social anxiety, and withdrawal from the social environment [
22,
23].
Other elements that place certain groups at risk of harassment are sexual tendencies (e.g., homosexuality) [
24], religious practice [
25], and different types of functional diversity [
26], encompassing a wide threshold of possibilities.
Even so, there are elements that make it possible to glimpse possible solutions or responses to cases of harassment. One of them is young people’s positive perception of teachers, which reduces the risk of victimization and perpetration [
27]. Another element is the expression of empathy of students with harassed classmates [
28]. The school climate and parental involvement mitigate the effects of bullying [
29], and even the control they can exert over their children [
30]. Another element of vital importance is peer tutoring, which allows for predicting the decrease of intimidation, victimization, struggle, and anger [
31].
It should be kept in mind that in order to act and prevent bullying of adolescents, those most vulnerable to harassment must be identified. Threatening behaviors and the possibility that a student may report them should be examined [
32].
In certain areas, bullying is being prevented and detected using gambling-based teaching methods (gamification) and integrating less common elements such as social interaction, augmented reality, and mobile phones with educational settings [
33].
2. Materials and Methods
This was a bibliometric study by literature review, documentary quantification, and data visualization techniques [
34,
35,
36].
The general objective of this paper was to analyze the scientific production with the greatest impact on racial or ethnic bullying in Scopus (S) and Web of Science (W). In addition, this study aimed to achieve the following specific objectives:
(1) To analyze scientific production from a diachronic perspective;
(2) To study the most prolific authors, institutions, countries, and journals in terms of the object of research;
(3) To review the type of document, the area of publication, and the language in which it is published;
(4) To carry out an analysis of the content of the titles, abstracts, and keywords of the documents, taking as a reference the object of study (bullying) and the related variables: ethnicity, race, and perspective of the victims.
Procedure and Selection of the Sample
In order to achieve the above objectives, we carried out different thematic searches (April–May 2019) in the Scopus database (SJR) and in the main collection of the Web of Science (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index). The keywords were delimited through the ERIC Thesaurus, and the following were selected: “racial bullying” (RB) and “ethnic bullying” (EB).
The total sample consisted of n = 831 documents. The search process is represented through the PRISMA flowchart (
Figure 1), where we depict the flow of information through the different phases of review [
37] and in which we contemplated nine scientific production variables.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
The current society is characterized by the enormous speed at which the different areas that compose it evolve. In the educational landscape, the evolution at a technological level has generated important improvements in the teaching and learning processes. However, technology has also contributed to a considerable increase in the rates of violence by schoolchildren, with mobile devices and internet access being the most prolific focus of attacks [
2].
In this way, harassment in general and cyberbullying in particular, are considered today as an important social problem [
4] derived from the enormous negative consequences on young people who suffer from it [
6,
7,
9,
10,
11].
Although the great diversity in the types of harassment makes it impossible to determine a specific profile [
8], the review of the literature has shown that ethnic minorities are prone to suffer this type of violence [
17], especially among first generation migrants [
18].
Therefore, ethnic identity constitutes a differential factor in harassment [
20], appearing to be accompanied generally by very poor socio-economic and cultural status [
21], favoring depressive tendencies in the ethnic harassed [
15], and drug consumption [
24].
Starting from this complex social paradigm in which harassment has emerged as a problem of capital importance, in the scientific literature it has been possible to find some possible answers to counter this type of violence. Among these proposals are the enhancement of empathy with colleagues who suffer harassment [
29], tutorial action [
32], the dignification of teaching [
28], and parental involvement [
30,
31].
To address student bullying, it is essential to identify the students that generate it and suffer from it [
33], and to take measures that enable optimal prevention and proper treatment [
34]. Therefore, it is especially interesting to assess the scientific base of knowledge, in order to use this question as a starting point in the elaboration of action plans that allow an optimal transfer between the scientific literature and implementation in practice.
In this way, the present study contributes in providing information on the state of racial or ethnic bullying issues with the greatest current impact. This contribution is made based on the analysis carried out in the Scopus and Web of Science databases and through systematic review [
37].
In the analysis made from the published literature on the subjects that have been studied, it can be concluded that there are 831 relevant publications, with a notable increase in publication volume in recent years (2011–2019), highlighting the author Dewey Cornell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA). In addition, US publications are more prolific than the publications of the rest of the world, being directed to magazines on scholastic health and adolescence. Likewise, it is pertinent to highlight that most of these works are scientific articles published in journals, in areas related mainly to the field of psychology and health, with English being the main language used.
The analysis of co-occurrence based on the information provided by the title, the summary, and the keywords allows us to conclude that the bullying research is currently focused on the sample level in both adolescent groups and groups of children, with special emphasis on those that overlap racial or ethnic minorities. Ethnic studies are focused on the Hispanic-American, Caucasian, African, and Asian populations, with a special preponderance of the North American school context, while studies that focused on analysis of racial bullying are focused on the African-American population. In this way, there is a special predominance of studies that analyze the perspective of the victim from different perspectives, especially analyzing their ethnic origin, the inherent risk factors, the consequences caused by being a victim within the peer group, the context in which that occurs, and the socio-economic position of the victim.