Cyberbullying through the New Media

Findings from an international network

Peter K. Smith, Georges Steffgen, Peter K. Smith, Georges Steffgen

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134441372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Cyberbullying is one of the darker and more troubling aspects to the growing accessibility of new media technologies. Children in developed countries engage with cyberspace at younger and younger ages, and the use of the internet as a means to bully and harass has been greeted with alarm by educationalists, parents, the media, and governments.

This important new book is the result of a four-year international collaboration, funded by the EU, to better understand how we can cope and confront cyberbullying, and how new media technologies can be used to actually support the victims of such abuse. The articles initially define the historical and theoretical context to cyberbullying, before examining key issues involved in managing this pervasive phenomenon. Coverage includes:

• The definition and measurement of cyberbullying.

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• The legal challenges in tackling cyberbullying across a number of international contexts.

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• The role of mobile phone companies and Internet service providers in monitoring and prevention

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• How the media frame and present the issue, and how that influences our understanding.

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• How victims can cope with the effects of cyberbullying, and the guidelines and advice provided in different countries.

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• How cyber-bullying can continue from school into further education, and the strategies that can be used to prevent it.

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• The ways in which accessing 'youth voice', or maximising the contribution of young people themselves to the research process, can enhance our understanding

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The book concludes with practical guidance to help confront the trauma that cyberbullying can cause. It will be a valuable resource for researchers, students, policy makers and administrators with an interest in how children and young people are rendered vulnerable to bullying and harassment through a variety of online channels.

Part 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203799079-1

1 The nature of cyberbullying, and an international network

Peter K. Smith, Georges Steffgen and Ruthaychonnee (Ruth) Sittichai

DOI: 10.4324/9780203799079-2

“Cyberbullying” refers to bullying and harassment of others by means of new electronic technologies, primarily mobile phones and the internet. There has been much research and action on traditional forms of bullying in schools, with some success, but cyberbullying has arisen and increased in the last decade. This chapter starts with a review of cyberbullying, and how research on the topic has developed this century. It continues with explaining what a COST Action is, and how an international network of 28 countries took forward aspects of research into cyberbullying. The progress and outputs of the network were organized on a website, which is described.

Review of cyberbullying research

A few journal reviews of cyberbullying already exist (e.g. Mora-Merchán & Jäger, 2010; Smith, 2012; Smith & Slonje, 2010; Tokunaga, 2010), but the area is developing very rapidly, in part as new technologies develop and new fashions (such as particular social networking sites) appear. In this review we briefly highlight some important aspects, including definitional criteria; types of cyberbullying; age and gender differences; overlap with traditional bullying and sequence of events; differences between cyberbullying and traditional bullying; motives for perpetration and impact on victims; student coping strategies, and school-based prevention/intervention.

Definitional issues

Over the last decade, awareness of cyberbullying, followed by research activity and publications, has increased dynamically. Much of the literature (though not all) is on cyberbullying in young people. Also, much of the literature (though not all) stems from a psychological perspective, and has built on a thirty-year tradition of research on what is often called “traditional” bullying, or “offline” bullying. This carry-on includes both early definitions of cyberbullying, as well as the kinds of topics pursued (such as characteristics of cyber-bullies and cyber-victims). Nevertheless, other disciplinary perspectives are also present, and the area presents some new challenges as well as opportunities for researchers (Bauman, Walker, & Cross, 2013; Smith, 2010).

Bullying is generally seen as intentional behaviour to harm another, repeatedly, where it is difficult for the victim to defend himself or herself (Olweus, 1999). It is based on an imbalance of power and can be defined as a systematic abuse of power (Rigby, 2002; Smith & Sharp, 1994). By extending the definition from traditional bullying, cyberbullying has been defined as “an aggressive act or behaviour that is carried out using electronic means by a group or an individual repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself” (Smith, Mahdavi, Carvalho, Fisher, Russell, & Tippett, 2008). From this perspective, cyberbullying is a systematic abuse of power which occurs through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Although the definition mentioned above (or similar ones) is quite common within the cyberbullying context, some of these definitional aspects are under debate. Two criteria in particular separate bullying from more general aggression (i.e. intent to cause harm). These are the aspects of repetition, and power imbalance. Both can be seen as relatively clear for traditional bullying, but have more difficulties in application to cyberbullying.

First, the idea of repetition within cyberbullying is not straightforward; one cyberbullying act may readily “snowball” out of the initial control of the bully, due to the technology used. An example is a picture that is sent (or uploaded onto the Internet), that at a later stage is distributed by other people (not the initial perpetrator). Thus a single act by one perpetrator may be repeated many times by others, and experienced many times by the victim. If the repetition is not carried out by the perpetrator, is this still cyberbullying?

The second definitional issue is that of power imbalance. In traditional bullying this might refer to physical strength, psychological confidence, numbers, or popularity/rejection in a peer group context. But physical strength is not necessary for perpetration of cyberbullying, nor is strength of numbers. However, two rather new possibilities of power imbalance in cyberbullying are technical ability with ICTs, and anonymity (Vandebosch & Van Cleemput, 2008). For example, it is more difficult to respond effectively if you do not know the identity of the perpetrator; conversely, if a victim does know the perpetrator, then the more conventional criteria of physical/psychological strength and peer group popularity may come back into play (i.e. a victim may be fearful of retaliating against a popular and stronger pupil who may take further revenge offline).

Although it is possible to mount a defense of the criteria of repetition and imbalance of power in the cyberbullying domain, there are clearly difficulties (Smith, del Barrio, & Tokunaga, 2013). In practice, some studies actually measure cyber-aggression or cyber-abuse since they do not clearly include these two aspects (Bauman, Underwood, & Card, 2013). These issues are also discussed in Chapter 2.

Types of cyberbullying

Some studies just look at cyberbullying as a single construct. While suitable for some purposes, many aspects of cyberbullying (such as gender differences, or impact) seem to vary by the specific type of cyberbullying experienced. Some studies have divided cyberbullying into the two main media of Internet and mobile phone bullying (e.g. Ortega, Elipe, Mora-Merchán, Calmaestra, & Vega, 2009). However, in recent years the advent of smartphones makes it possible to send and receive emails via a mobile phone as well as use these phones to access the Internet more broadly; this makes the earlier distinction between mobile phone and Internet bullying problematic.

Some studies have investigated cyberbullying via a range of more specific media. Smith et al. (2008) used seven main media described by secondary school pupils: mobile phone calls, text messages, picture/video clip bullying, emails, chatroom, instant messaging, and websites. Hinduja and Patchin (2010) used a nine-item cyber victimization scale, covering similar media. Wachs and Wolf (2011) used a five-item scale, again covering similar media but grouping some of those together (e.g. text message/mobile phone call). In South Korea, cyberbullying in Internet game contexts has been found to be a very common form (Tippett & Kwak, 2012). These lists of types of cyberbullying and aggression are not exhaustive, and as technology develops, new forms of cyberbullying emerge.

An alternative to looking at the medium used in cyberbullying is to look at the type of action, or its content. There are a range of types of action, including flaming (online verbal fights); online harassment; cyberstalking (online intimidation/harassment); denigration (put-downs); masquerade (pretending to be someone else to send/post material to damage someone); outing (sharing embarrassing information or images of someone); exclusion (from an online group); putting up false profiles; distributing personal material against someone’s wishes. Pyzalski (2012) listed 20 such categories of “electronic aggression”. These are, to some extent, independent of the media used. Rivers and Noret (2010) described the content of abusive text messages and emails, in an English sample. Their ten main categories were: threat of physical violence, abusive or hate-related, name calling (including homophobia), death threats, ending of platonic relationship(s), sexual acts, demands/instructions, threats to damage existing relationships, threats to home/family, and menacing chain messages.

The ways young people communicate through ICT are rapidly changing. Over the last few years the spread of smartphones has enabled someone to use his/her mobile phone both for Internet as well as text messaging and calling. There has been a rapid increase in popularity of social networking sites such as Myspace or Facebook. Twitter has been another social networking development that has seen very rapid growth in recent years. New descriptive words are coming in: for example “sexting” describes the circulation of sexualized images on mobile phones or the Internet; “trolling” describes persistent abusive comments on a particular website; “griefing” describes harassment of someone in a cyber game or virtual world. Researchers in the field need to keep up to date with such changes and expansions regarding new modes of cyberbullying and cyber aggression.

Age and ge...