Objective  To examine the prevalence of self-harm behavior among junior high school students in Beijing and to explore the association between self-harm and bullying victimization for providing evidences for self-harm prevention in the students.

  Methods  We conducted a self-administered questionnaire survey among 14 933 students from 63 junior high schools selected with stratified multistage cluster sampling in 16 counties/districts of Beijing municipality from March to May 2014.

  Results  Of 14 769 students with valid response, 15.9% reported having self-harm behavior during past 12 months and the reported prevalence rate of self-harm behavior was significantly lower among the boy students than among the girl students (14.5% vs. 17.4%, χ² = 22.075; P < 0.001). Among the students with self-harm behaviors, 48.6% (n = 1 140), 31.1% (729), and 20.3% (477) reported committing a self-harm once, twice or three times, and four times or more, respectively. The reported proportions of bullying victimization during past one month in the students were 39.8% for malicious teasing, 19.8% for sexual teasing, 14.5% for bullying on the pretext of looks, 14.3% for threatening, 8.0% for violence incident, 7.1% for extorting money or property, and 6.2% for deliberated isolation, respectively. Multivariate unconditional logistic regression analysis revealed that all the 7 bullying victimizations mentioned above could significantly increase the risk of self-harm behaviors after controlling for confounding factors such as gender, grade, residential region, and school type (P < 0.05 for all) and the bullying victimization was positively correlated with the risk of self-harm among the students.

  Conclusion  Bullying victimization is significantly associated with self-harm behavior positively in an affect-response manner among junior high school students in Beijing.