This brief presents a new approach to the study of bullying and prejudice in school settings, analyzing the particularities of these two forms of violence and relating them to the hierarchies that distinguish students based on academic performance and popularity. Analyzing data gathered by surveys carried out between 2010 and 2014 with 274 students from public schools of São Paulo, Brazil, the authors show that, despite bullying and prejudice are related, they have specific characteristics that need to be acknowledged in order to help educators develop more efficient initiatives to prevent them.