Who Stands Up? Analyzing Students’ Drawings of the Ideal Bullying Defender

While prior studies investigated predictors of defending behaviors, less is known about how students themselves view defenders. This study aimed to examine how students portray defenders through an ecological drawing task. We invited 122 Italian low secondary school students to draw themselves and their “ideal defender.” Drawings were analyzed for aspects such as defender gender, character type (peer, adult, or fantastical), behavior (oriented towards the victim or the bully), and relational dimensions with the drawing's creator (cohesion, distancing, similarity, and value), and examined for gender disparities. Chi-square tests and one-way Student's t-tests were conducted using R software. Most students illustrated defenders as peers and represented victim-supportive behaviors (e.g., embracing the protagonist). Female students depicted defenders mostly as same-gender peers, whereas male students often chose powerful or fantastical figures (p = .006). Relational analysis showed that female participants displayed higher cohesion (p = .045), more joint activities with the ideal defender (p = .035), and similarity in height (p = .012), whereas male students exhibited more distancing (p = .020). These results underscore the pivotal role of peer support in anti-bullying initiatives, suggesting that enhancing relational skills and cohesion among students can strengthen their collective responsibility toward each other.