Correlation Between Occurrence of Bullying, Victimization and Deleterious Oral Habits Among School Children in Cairo Governorate, Egypt: Cross-Sectional Study

Bullying is a major educational and public health problem among school-aged children that has a short and long negative effect on their physiological and psychosocial health.

Bullying among school children is widely spreading and has different forms including physical as hitting, kicking, or verbal as an insult social as spreading rumors or the social exclusion or psychological as stalking or cyberbullying as online hacking.

Bullying affects children greatly in different manners as lack of self-esteem, lack of concentration, depression, anxiety, and expressing feeling of loneliness. The World Health Organization (WHO) stated that "the frequency of bullying was estimated to be 8- 30 % and may reach 50% in many studies and In Egypt, the prevalence of bullying according to UNICEF was 77.8% among adolescent rural school students in other words 1 in 3 students experience bullying regularly, a recent study in Egypt showed the prevalence of bullying and victimization was high (67.5%) among studied group.

Deleterious oral habits are one of the public health problems that are commonly seen among children, it is defined as repeated orofacial muscular activities without a functional benefit Deleterious oral habits depend mainly on frequency, onset, and duration of habit which causes malocclusion such as open bite, deep bite, crossbite, and overjet that affects children's quality of life and cause psychological and esthetic problem, recent study In Alexandria, Egypt found that most seen oral habits in age 6 to 12 years are nail-biting 41.07% then tongue thrust 29.4% then mouth breathing with 15.9% and the least thumb sucking with 15.1%.

Children exposed to emotional stress and anxiety as bullying or need for comfort is considered as a main contributing factor to having an oral habit as children use oral habit as a source of safety and as a mechanism to release tension, pain, and anger through it. It is seen in children as bruxism, pacifier sucking, thumb sucking, mouth breathing, tongue thrusting, lip sucking, and biting and nail-biting.