Prevention of Cyberbullying at Schools

Introduction

When you enter the term “cyberbullying” in Google Academic and restrict the search for years 2000-2009, you get 3.720 results in, 08 seconds. On the other hand, when you restrict the search for years between 2010-2019, you get 26.300 results in (,09 seconds) which can be considered as the clear evidence of a globally growing interest in cyberbullying both as a research area and as a problem for parents, educators and psychologists (Aoyama & Talbert, 2010; Butler, Kift, Campbell, Slee & Spears, 2011). The literature on the issue show that it is becoming a more serious and frequent global phenomena day by day (Aoyama & Talbert, 2010; Bakar, Yusof, & Budiman, 2013; Carmasino, 2016; Chisholm, 2014; Elledge, Williford, Boulton, DePaolis, Little & Salmivalli, 2013; Li, 2008). According to cyberbullying statistics by Hinduja & Patchin (2019) the victimization of cyberbullying has nearly doubled from 2007 to 2019 among the middle and high school students in the U.S.A. Additionally, on average nearly 28% of the students have reported being a victim of cyberbullying at some point in their lifetime. Another recent research by Erişti & Akbulut (2019) confirms these statistics indicating that thirty seven percent of the students have been cyberbullied in Turkey in the last six months.

Thanks to improvements in technology, communication today is much faster and more frequent compared to the past (Stauffer, 2011). Networks and wireless communication platforms not only have enabled students to remove the barriers and provided access to virtually limitless information and resources (Diamanduros, Downs & Jenkins, 2008); but also they increase students’ social interaction and collaboration in learning experience (Li, 2005; Li & Calgary, 2006). However, those facilities provide a communication without adequate monitoring and with more anonymity (Akbulut & Çuhadar, 2015; Shariff & Hoff, 2007) which leads to cyberbullying as one of the most prominent issues recently (Li, 2005; Slonje, Smith & Fresen, 2012). In other words, it can be stated that electronic forms of social communication are being used as platforms to bully others by children (Elledge & et. al, 2013). While describing the situation Guo (2016) states that;

“With the rapid spread of the Internet and electronic communication and the increased growth in the use of computers and mobile phones by young people, bullying has taken on a new and more insidious dimension, surfacing from the physical to the virtual in the form of cyberbullying.”