Experience as a Victim of Bullying and Body Image Perception in Adolescents

This study aims to determine the relationship between experiences as victims of bullying and the perception of adolescent body image. The hypothesis of this research is that there is a positive relationship between experiences as victims of bullying and the perception of negative body image in adolescents. Participants in this study involved 100 adolescents in Kupang City aged 15-23 years (79 girls and 21 boys) who experienced bullying in the past year. The study used a quantitative approach with a modified Forms of Bullying-Victimization scale and a modified Body Satisfaction scale. Hypothesis testing with the Pearson Product Moment correlation technique shows a correlation coefficient of 0.319* with a significance level of 0.0005 (p <0.01). The results showed that there was a significant positive relationship between experiences as victims of bullying and perception of body image. This study concluded that the higher the level of bullying experienced by the victim, the higher the negative body image perception was.


Introduction
Adolescence is a period of transition from childhood to adulthood. At every stage of development, including the adolescent stage, it is always accompanied by developmental problems that affect a person in development. Research conducted by the Pew Research Center (2013) on adolescents in America found that 70% of adolescent aged 13-17 said that mental health was the main problem. Bullying is considered the next problem by 90% of teens. About 29% of adolescents feel pressure to look good in addition to demands for achievement.
Self-development occurs quite rapidly in adolescence, including physical development. Adolescents begin to develop sexual attraction so that more teenagers pay attention to appearance and build body image. Pujawati (2015) revealed that adolescents who have less than ideal bodies sometimes feel ashamed and insecure about being accepted by their social environment. Holubcikova et al. (2015) found that differences in the appearance or behavior of adolescents can be reasons for being chosen as friends or targets of victims of bullying. Wiyani (2012) (2018) concluded that bullying in childhood causes adjustment problems for children and Vol.3, No.1, March 2021, pp.58~68 adolescents and can cause adverse effects throughout life, including mental, physical, and socio-economic difficulties. Bees (2016) reveals that cases of bullying at high schools in Kupang City are often seen as a common or traditional behavior by teachers and students who are carried away during the orientation period. Handling of bullying cases is only done to students who bully, while victims are not guaranteed to be free from cases of bullying.

Journal of Health and Behavioral Science
The author conducted interviews with seven high school students in Kupang City and found that six people claimed to have been teased about their body shape and condition by their school friends. Two people said they were teased as fat, while the other two teenagers were teased by their schoolmates as skinny. Two people claimed to have been ridiculed because of their black skin color and two people were mocked because of the shape of their lips. Two teenagers said that they had been teased as short, and one of them had his bag thrown into the closet by his classmates because of his short stature. Departing from this phenomenon and research on cases of bullying and body image in Kupang City, it is still rare for researchers to be interested in examining experiences of bullying with the perception of body image in adolescents.
The hypothesis in this study is that there is a positive relationship between experiences as victims of bullying and the perception of negative body image in adolescents.

Method
Participants in this study involved 100 adolescent participants (79 girls and 21 boys) in Kupang City, aged 15-23 years, who experienced bullying in the past year. The approach used in this research is a quantitative approach using correlation analysis.
The type of correlation analysis used is the Pearson Product Moment correlation analysis.
The independent variable in this study experiences as a victim of bullying.
Experience as a victim of bullying is someone who experiences acts of aggression such Vol.3, No.1, March 2021, pp.58~68 as being ridiculed, threatened, injured, reported false rumors, damaged or stolen things, and isolated by another person or group of people, on purpose and repeatedly. This variable is measured using a modified scale Forms of Bullying Scale-Victimization (FBS-V) which consists of five aspects, namely verbal, threatening, physical, relational, and social. There are five answer choices in FBS-V, namely never, rarely, sometimes, often, very often. The lowest score on this measuring instrument is 11, and the highest value is 55. The higher the score, the higher the tendency to become victims of bullying.

Journal of Health and Behavioral Science
The dependent variable in this study is the perception of body image.
Perception of body image is defined as the process of individuals inferring information about their body in the form of body shape and size as well as appearance as a result of assessments by themselves and others. The measuring instrument used is the Body Satisfaction Scale which has three aspects, affective, cognitive, and behavioral. This scale has five answer choices, namely strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. The lowest value on this measuring instrument is 17, while the highest value is 85. The higher the value obtained, the negative body image perception will be.

Result
Statistical processing produces the following data.     Table 1 shows the distribution of data on the experience variable as victims of bullying and the perception of body image that is normally distributed.

Discussion
The test results in the study showed that the correlation between the The research variable of experience as victims of bullying and body image perception with the highest score is in the medium category. Duarte et al. (2017) explained that although cases of bullying decrease over time, at the peak of these experiences, the level of perception of body image is negative. During adolescence, the perception of body image becomes important because adolescents experience puberty.
Adolescents begin to develop sexual attraction so that appearance is important compared to other aspects (Papalia, 2011 Holubcikova et al. (2015) state that male adolescents are more likely to be involved in bullying, both as perpetrators and victims of bullying. Research by Shaheen et al. (2017) also found that teenage boys are more at risk of experiencing bullying because men are more open and accepting of the use of power. This result differs from the findings of Hidayat et al. (2019), in which women experience more verbal abuse than men. In this study, the measuring tool for the experience of victims of bullying includes all forms, including verbal, physical, threatening, relational, and social, so that it is found that the risk of male adolescents becoming victims of bullying is higher than that of women.

Conclusion
The results of the study concluded that there was a positive and significant relationship between experiences as victims of bullying and the perception of negative body image in adolescents. The results of the analysis show that the correlation coefficient is 0.319 * with a significance of 0.0005. Although the research data shows a weak relationship, the results of previous studies support this research.
Developments in adolescence make teens focus more on physical appearance as they begin to develop a sexual attraction. Holubcikova et al. (2015) revealed that Advice that can be given from this research for adolescents in Kupang City is to develop a positive body image perception by developing themselves such as participating in various online training to minimize the vulnerability of becoming victims of bullying. Parents can provide positive encouragement for adolescents to be able to participate in positive youth activities for self-development and be more reactive to cases of bullying that occur around children.
Suggestions for the Kupang City government to be able to provide education to adolescents and parents regarding the negative impacts on victims of bullying so as to minimize bullying among teenagers. For further researchers, they can find deeper forms of bullying that are more frequently experienced, the factors forming negative body image perceptions from adolescence and experiences as victims of bullying, and the perception of body image that are associated with economic factors. This research can also be followed up by examining the victims of bullying in male adolescents and training interventions to increase self-confidence for victims of bullying.