In western countries, there is concern about ethnic school segregation, as recent studies find indications that it is unfavorable for educational achievement (eg. Sweden: Szulkin & Jonsson, 2006; the Netherlands: Karsten et al., 2006). However, other studies have pointed to the flip side of this picture, arguing that school desegregation might have negative consequences for non-cognitive outcomes, such as peer victimization (Hanish & Guerra, 2000). When educational policies do not consider these potential adverse consequences, they are at risk to fail. Therefore, educational research should identify and explain these negative effects of desegregation, in order to counteract them and make desegregation policies work. In this contribution, we focus on perceived peer victimization as a possible effect of ethnic school composition. Studies investigating this, have found widely divergent results, and have still not come to an understanding of this relationship (Graham, 2006; Hanish & Guerra, 2000; Juvonen, et al., 2006; Verkuyten & Thijs, 2002; Vervoort, Scholte, & Overbeek, 2008). One of the factors responsible for this, can be the differing operationalization of ethnic composition – some use the proportion of students from a certain ethnic group  (Vervoort et al., 2008), others a calculated index of heterogeneity (Graham, 2006; Juvonen et al., 2006). To counter this, we use both constructs simultaneously.
For our analyses, we draw upon three theoretical frameworks. Firstly, we use the ‘Imbalance of Power’-thesis, that states that victimization is most likely to occur when ethnic groups are differing in size (Graham, 2006; Juvonen et al., 2006). This explanation starts from the most defining characteristic of victimization: the imbalance of power that exists between bully and victim. These actors are said to draw their power from the numerical strength of their ethnic group: if the own group is larger, they have more power, and vice versa. However, this new line of reasoning counters the well-established approach of group threat theory (Blalock, 1967), that states that interethnic conflict is most likely in schools with ethnic groups that have roughly the same size: in those contexts, it is not clear which group is in charge, and, as bullying is a strategy to acquire social dominance (Demanet, 2008), it is used to resolve the matter. As a third theory, we use constrict theory (Putnam, 2007). According to this theory, the amount of ethnic diversity in a given context triggers social anomie or social isolation. As such, this theory can be used to hypothesize that victimization rates are higher in schools with a larger ethnic heterogeneity.
The above stated theories contend that the relation between ethnic composition and peer victimization is not a mechanical one, but is moderated by intermediate processes. Especially certain factors of the school interethnic climate are said to mediate the relationship between ethnic composition of the school and victimization. In our contribution, we test these hypotheses as well. More specifically, we test whether the amount of interethnic conflict at school, the number of interethnic friendships in a school, and the amount of multicultural education at school indeed act as mediating mechanisms.

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