‘Big brothers and sisters have my back’: Benefits and risks of befriending older peers as a strategy to deal with school bullying

Befriending ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ from older year groups was a strategy used by children to gain protection against being bullied by same-age peers at school, especially in contexts, such as Chinese rural boarding schools, where children spend a long time with peers under limited adult supervision. However, it is alarming that such close connections with older children, in some cases, could give children a feeling of having power over their same-age peers, leading them to engage in bullying. In addition, since the roles as the provider and receiver of protection could cause an unbalanced power between the older ones and younger ones, younger children might have to experience a ‘dark’ side of such cross-age peer relationships, such as exploitation, in some cases. Such experiences could be further strengthened by the Chinese values of ‘giving’ and ‘gaining’ in relationships. Therefore, based on an ethnographic study in a rural primary boarding school in China, this article argues that befriending older peers could contribute to increasing the safety of children at school. However, it is also necessary to be aware of potential risks associated with such peer relationships, because of the unbalanced power relation amongst children caused by age.