Seemingly overnight, COVID-19 completely shifted our lives. For children and teens especially, this has meant spending more time than ever online. Nearly every aspect of their lives – from classroom learning to extra-curricular activities and hanging out with friends – now takes place, in part, behind a screen.
While social media platforms, apps, and video conferencing can help young people stay connected to their peers, it has also led to an increase in their exposure to online hate and violence. Recent studies have shown that the majority of children and teens who had experienced online hate and violence before the COVID-19 reported an increase during lockdown. In Canada, calls to the Kids Help Phone crisis line have soared during the pandemic.
Experts have suggested that incidents of online hate and violence may be on the rise due to mental health concerns; COVID-19 has triggered specific stressors for young people including parental job loss and health anxiety. Stressors such as these have been found to play a large role in children and teens bullying others. But as we enter both the fourth wave of the pandemic and a new school year, it is clear we need better strategies to address this phenomenon known as cyberbullying.
What is cyberbullying?
Since the rise of the internet in the early 2000s, parents, educators, and even legislators have had an increasing awareness of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is defined as a repeated, aggressive, and intentional act carried out by a group or an individual using electronic forms of contact such as a computer or cellphone. This can look like derogatory or hateful comments on a selfie posted on social media, a constant stream of negative private messages, or – in severe cases – direct threats of sexual or physical violence. Canadian research has found that around half of adolescents (aged 12 to 13) report being victims of cyberbullying, while additional research found that nearly one third of American female internet users (aged 10 to 17 years old) have experienced online sexual soliciting.
Even though cyberbullying does not happen face-to-face, it is still serious and can cause real and substantial harms for young people: depression, insecurity, embarrassment, anxiety, avoidance of the internet and/or school, lower grades, and increased drop-outs from school, to name just a few. Online violence has also led to long-lasting mental health issues for victims and survivors and, in extreme cases, teen suicides.
Cyberbullying can also affect certain groups more than others. A 2021 report by the advocacy group Egale Canada has shown that 30 percent of 2SLGBTQIA+ students experience some form of cyberbullying compared with only eight percent of cisgender, heterosexual respondents. And as many high-profile cases in the news and in the courts have shown us, young women are more vulnerable to severe forms of cyberbullying including sexual harassment, stalking, and non-consensual online distribution of intimate images. As one team of researchers has suggested, the risks for cyberbullying do not solely come from technology use; they are also social.
What Can Be Done?
Though cyberbullying receives a large amount public attention, there is limited research on how to address it. And now more than ever, we need solutions. As schools gradually begin re-opening this fall, concerns remain that students who experienced cyberbullying at home will now face harassment in both digital and physical contexts.
Teachers play a pivotal role in the prevention and intervention of cyberbullying and are often placed in leadership roles to try to address it, which can be done in a variety of different ways. They can focus on whole-classroom strategies by encouraging appropriate behaviours among students and using class time to promote online safety and respect. Other strategies can focus either on those who cyberbully by addressing the behavior and explaining its intolerability or on those who experience it by providing support or counselling.
But we cannot expect individual teachers to address cyberbullying without support. Research has shown that many educators do not feel confident in responding to incidents of cyberbullying, and student teachers specifically have stated that they do not receive enough training in the area. Even my own research has shown that Quebec high-school teachers feel ill-equipped and under-trained when faced with bullying in the classroom.
It is clear we need a holistic approach – one that engages teachers, parents, and students. Future research could explore opinions from these groups on how best to address online violence in teacher training programs, in the classroom, among students themselves, and beyond. Cyberbullying will not be solved overnight. But as the pandemic continues sheds light on its prevalence, it is crucial we start doing the work needed to make learning environments and online spaces safer for everyone.
Farah Roxanne Stonebanks is a master’s student in McGill's Department of Integrated Studies in Education. She holds an undergraduate degree in psychology. Her research interests include bullying behaviours, anti-bullying initiatives, and how schools can better work towards effective prevention and reaction to negative occurrences between students.
