According to Bill Belsey, developer of www.bullying.org, "cyberbullying involves the use of information and communication technologies such as email, cell phone and paper text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal web sites, and defamatory online personal polling web sites, to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behavior by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others" (Belsey, 2006).
| Examples of Cyberbullying | Sending threatening or hateful messages to others | Posing as others while online | Sending thousands of text messages to the same person in a limited amount of time | Sending death threats using Instant Messaging and text-messaging | Stealing passwords and pretending to be someone you're not |
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Using online blogs to write embarrassing or defamatory things about others | Teasing and insulting others via web sites | Sending nude or degrading pictures through e-mail or text messages | Setting up a poll on the Internet to "rate" others | Knowingly sending spyware or viruses to another Internet user |
Research on Cyberbullying:
In an article written by Qing Li in December 2005, research was conducted to determine to what extent adolescents experience cyberbullying. The author looked at 177 students from the seventh grade at two middle schools in a large Western Canadian city. The students were given an anonymous survey to determine their demographic information and their experience with cyberbullying. The results found that almost 54% of the students were bully victims and over 25% had been cyberbullied (Li, 2005). Almost 15% had bullied others in cyberspace and 53% reported knowing someone who had been cyberbullied. The most frequent perpetrator of cyberbullying was a schoolmate, yet almost half of the victims reported not knowing their bully's identity. The majority of the cyberbully victims were female and half had above average school grades. The results also showed that almost half of the victims had, themselves, bullied others (Li, 2005).
The majority of the cyberbullying in this study occurred via chat rooms and email, however most victims were bullied through multiple sources. Only 34% of these victims stated that they told an adult about the bullying while the majority told no one. The results of this study suggest that cyberbullying is a major problem in schools (Li, 2005) and that few students are informing adults about harassment when it does occur.
Li, Q. (2005). New bottle but old wine: A research of cyberbullying in schools. Computers in Human Behavior, 21, 1-15.
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