Languages and Education Consultant

Bullying and Cyberbullying - brief introduction

 

 

Olweus (2003), defined bullying as: “A student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more students. The person who intentionally inflicts, or attempts or inflict, injury or discomfort upon someone else is engaging in negative actions. Bullying also entails an imbalance in strength (or an asymmetric power relationship), meaning that students exposed to the negative actions have difficulty in defending themselves”.

With the advance of technology and the increasingly higher use of resources such as the Internet, a new form of bullying became of scientific interest: cyberbullying. Cyberbullying can be defined as: “an overt, intentional act of aggression towards another person online” (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2004b) or: “(…) bullying via electronic communication tools such as email, cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), instant messaging or the World Wide Web” (Li, 2007).

The extreme cases, such as suicides of bullying or cyberbullying victims (e.g. Lipman, 2003; Bearman & Moody, 2004) and the shootings in schools often related to chronic bullying victimization (Carney & Merrill, 2001; Unnever, 2005), brought to light the need to react to this situations instead of considering them simply as ‘rites of passage’.

Evolution gave way to a new surge of technologies and that allowed for cyberbullying to come along. Much has been said for cyberbullying, but in fact it’s simply a new way to bully, using technologies. However, further studies made possible to understand that, although both bullying and cyberbullying can be considered two faces of the same coin, their precedents and consequences are not always the same. In fact, studies show differences not only in prevalence and type, but also in role characteristics. And as such, it’s important to study roles characteristics independently, for a bullying victim does not necessarily shows the same characteristics that a cyberbullying victim.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are several behaviours considered cyberbullying, such as: flaming, that is the sending of negative messages about someone; online harassment which is basically the continuous sending of negative messages about someone; cyber stalking, which is sending threatening or intimidating messages and making the other person fear for her safety; denigration, that consists in spreading rumours or false information about someone online; masquerade, that is to pretend to be other person or post something online that will harm the other; outing, that is to spread information or images about someone; and exclusion, that is, to exclude someone from an online group.