Cyberbullying has increased with the pandemic
Insults, name-calling, pushing, shoving, hitting, kicking, isolation, theft, breaking belongings, humiliation, mockery, sexual harassment, threats, intimidation. We could continue with a long list of ways in which children and adolescents attack each other, physically or psychologically. This violence occurs in person but also in digital environments, with different forms, different rules, and with the added dimension of becoming a potentially 24/7 form of aggression, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
According to data from the NACE Association (No to School Bullying Association), one in five school children suffers bullying in Spain and only 15% of the victims dare to tell family members or teachers.
Cyberbullying emerged long ago, as long as personal digital devices have been in our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has given a boost to this type of peer harassment, which thrives on the lack of social empathy that comes with acting anonymously and maintaining a passive, observer role. In the digital world, it seems anything goes. Harassment spills into the public sphere due to the vast reach of messages and images disseminated through the internet, social media, messaging apps, and video game platforms.
Lucía del Alba Benito Fernández
The pandemic brought months of lockdown and, consequently, less in-person schooling and more social interaction through mobile devices. To gauge the impact of this phenomenon in Spain and how it has changed as a result of the pandemic, let's look at the data provided by the Third Report on Bullying Prevention in Schools during the Pandemic 2020 and 2021, published by the ANAR Foundation .
This study, which gathers data through more than 10,000 questionnaires from students and teachers in different Autonomous Communities, has detected a decrease in the perception of whether there are classmates who suffer bullying, dropping from 34.1% in 2019 to 15.2% in 2021-2022. The organization attributes this change to awareness-raising efforts carried out in schools.
Despite this decrease, the increase in group aggression is noteworthy, accounting for 72.4% of the cases of school bullying detected in 2020-2021 compared to 43% detected in previous years.
Regarding cases of cyberbullying , 24% of the children and adolescents surveyed say they know classmates who may have suffered it through channels such as WhatsApp (53.9% of cases), Instagram (44.4%), TikTok (38.5%) or video games (37.7%).
Accompanying our children in the use of ICT
The most frequent types of aggression are insults, name-calling, or teasing (86.3%), followed by the spreading of rumors, which has increased significantly in 2020-2021, rising from 11% in 2018-2019 to 46.9% in 2020-2021. Also noteworthy is the increase in violence directly related to cyberbullying, such as harassment on social media, which has risen from 0.2% to 22.6%, and taking photos and videos, a category not previously included, which now accounts for 15.4%.
The reasons The most common reasons for these attacks are physical appearance (52.5%), being different (46.4%), things they do or say (39.1%), their tastes (30.4%), being from another country, culture, race or religion (26.2%), being new (20.1%), their sexual orientation (15.2%) or having a lot or little money (14.2%).
Solving cases of school bullying
One of the most complex issues analyzed by the study is the fact that students report that almost half of all bullying cases remain unresolved , a perception that may be symptomatic of various factors: fear or shame, difficulty finding safe spaces or trustworthy people to turn to, underestimation of bullying situations, or insufficient integration of protocols in schools. In the case of cyberbullying , there is also the misconception that because it occurs in the digital environment, it has no connection to school, but this is not the case when it originates in an educational setting (formal or informal). According to the students, only 52.2% of cases were resolved, and 83% believe the school took some action to resolve the situation.
The students surveyed indicated that the most effective way to resolve bullying is by telling a teacher. Meanwhile, more than half of the teachers (51%) acknowledge the lack of resources and training among teaching staff as a barrier to intervening in bullying situations. The teachers expressed in this study that they believe working with students on respect for differences and dialogue, along with the involvement of parents in values education for prevention, makes more sense than punitive measures.
Addressing emotional intelligence in the digital environment is a common theme within the educational community. Students themselves acknowledge that 21.8% may have unknowingly participated in a case of bullying, while 96.4% state they would not do so if they were aware of it. The report highlights students' progress in identifying forms of aggression, as well as the most frequent reasons for it.
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