New bottle but old wine: A research of cyberbullying in schools

Abstract

This study investigates the nature and the extent of adolescences’ experience of cyberbullying. A survey study of 177 grade seven students in an urban city is conducted. In this paper, “cyberbullying” refers to bullying via electronic communication tools. The results show that almost 54% of the students were victims of traditional bullying and over a quarter of them had been cyber-bullied. Almost one in three students had bullied others in the traditional form, and almost 15% had bullied others using electronic communication tools. Almost 60% of the cyber victims are females, while over 52% of cyber-bullies are males. Majority of the cyber-bully victims and bystanders did not report the incidents to adults.

Introduction

School violence is a serious social problem both in Europe (Clarke and Kiselica, 1997, Hoover and Juul, 1993) and North America (Charach et al., 1995, Hoover and Olsen, 2001). This problem is particularly persistent and acute during junior high/middle school period (National-Center-for-Educational-Statistics, 1995). Possible reasons explaining this high frequency of school violence include the drastic biological and social changes experienced by adolescents.

[A]dolescence is a period of abrupt biological and social change. Specifically, the rapid body changes associated with the onset of adolescence and changes from primary to secondary school initiate dramatic changes in youngster’s peer group composition and status. Changes in peer group availability, individuals’ status within groups, and peer support confront youngsters as they are entering new, larger, and typically impersonal secondary schools. One way in which peer status is achieved in these sorts of environments, especially by boys, is through the selective use of aggression and other agonistic strategies.

(Pellegrini & Bartini, 2000)

Much of school violence, particularly during adolescence, involves students bullying their peers (Boulton, 1999). According to Hoover and Olsen, “up to 15% of students in American schools are frequently or severely harassed by their peers. … Only a slim majority of 4th through 12th graders … (55.2%) reported neither having been picked on nor picking on others” (Hoover & Olsen, 2001). Further, bully-victim cycles are found where individuals are both bullies and victims (Ma, 2001, Pellegrini and Bartini, 2000, Schwartz et al., 1993, Schwartz et al., 1997). More importantly, it is reported that in many school-shooting cases, bullying played a major role (Dedman, 2001).