Cyberbullying, the survey in schools in Sardinia. The results
The survey on cyberbullying in schools in Sardinia carried out by Eurispes, with the contribution of the Regional Councillorship for Planning and Budget, and thanks to the valuable collaboration of the Regional Councillorship for Education, had the difficult task of providing civil society, the school community, experts in the field, institutions and policy-makers with the necessary coordinates for the analysis and planning of interventions relating to the world of youth.
Young people today are already born surrounded by technology and live in total harmony with communication tools.
Such an environment profoundly impacts all aspects of daily life: language changes, times change, and so does the way we learn and learn.
Today’s technology-driven society creates great opportunities, provided, of course, that children make conscious and correct use of the available tools.
The new communication tools can, in fact, raise issues related to their use, which need to be assessed.
Communicating through technology allows children to interact with each other remotely and anonymously, with all the consequences, including the negative ones, that this can have on the development of adolescents’ personalities. Today, we are increasingly questioning the possible consequences that technological and scientific development can have on young people’s lives.
Distancing and anonymity can generate behaviour whose effects contrast with the principles that underpin civil coexistence, such as the Principle of Responsibility, according to which ‘each person undertakes to answer, to someone or himself, for his actions and the consequences thereof.
In this context, such conditions can make children insensitive to the suffering of others, as the absence of perception of the damage caused by their actions leads them to ignore the adverse effects on others’ lives.
Indeed, technology allows so-called bullies to infiltrate the homes of others, to materialise in every moment of their selected victim’s life, persecuting them with new high-tech tools and thus giving rise to the phenomenon of Cyberbullying.
The law of 29 May 2017, no. 71, aimed at preventing Cyberbullying in Italy, presents the phenomenon in detail, referring to “any form of pressure, aggression, harassment, blackmail, insult, denigration, defamation, identity fraud, alteration, unlawful acquisition, manipulation and unlawful processing of personal data against minors, carried out by electronic means, as well as the dissemination of online content, also targeting one or more members of the child’s family. The deliberate and primary purpose of this is to isolate a child or a group of children using severe abuse, damaging attacks or ridicule”.
The psychological consequences for victims of cyberbullying are easy to understand and range from shame and embarrassment to social isolation of the victim and various forms of depression, panic attacks, and extreme acts such as suicidal or self-harming actions.
A summary of the results follows. The full survey can be viewed online at the following link after registration: https://eurispes.eu/ricerca-rapporto/indagine-sul-cyberbullismo-nelle-scuole-della-sardegna-2022/
The purpose of the research
Given that schools are one of the places where bullying occurs most frequently, Eurispes’ aim in conducting this survey was to provide an up-to-date and a picture as comprehensive as possible of the phenomenon, including through the involvement of families and teachers.
Teachers deal every day with conflicting situations among pupils, where it is often challenging to draw the line between the occasional act of hostility or arrogance and actual bullying.
The survey aimed to identify the following types of phenomena which can be attributed to Cyberbullying:
– Flaming
– Harassment
– Cyber-stalking
– Denigration
– Impersonation
– Outing and Trickery
– Exclusion
– Cyber bashing (Happy Slapping)
– Sexting
Sexting is also part of cyberbullying. Sexting, widely practised among young people, involves sending sexually explicit messages and images aimed to identify the extent of the Cyberbullying phenomenon and its multiple dynamics but also to provide valuable tools to identify interventions aimed at the personal, ethical and social growth of young people.
Methodology
The survey was carried out on a probability sample taking into account the following variables: gender, age, geographical area, type of school, institute and the class attended.
The survey was carried out by conducting anonymous, semi-structured questionnaires with predetermined fixed alternatives, made up of closed-ended questions. The questionnaire method, closed or with predetermined fixed options, made it possible to obtain, in addition to a high response rate to the questionnaire, a more effective standardisation and greater ease in coding and analysing the answers provided by the respondents.
Three questionnaire models were elaborated and administered: one for children, one for parents and one for teachers.
The results of the survey
The survey involved 48 lower secondary schools and 49 upper secondary schools, distributed proportionally throughout the Island for a total of 97 institutes total of 5,784 questionnaires were submitted, of which 3,586 by pupils, 1,361 by parents and 837 by teachers. The massive participation in the survey, not only by pupils but also by parents, shows a strong interest in and awareness for the Cyberbullying phenomenon in Sardinia. On the other hand, managers and teaching staff filled in fewer questionnaires than children and parents.
The analysis of the questionnaires submitted made it possible to identify the specific features of cyberbullies, victims and spectators, as well as parents and teaching staff’s opinions and role in the digital harassment framework.
Cyberbullies
Through the children’s answers, it was possible to outline a quite precise picture of the dynamics around the Cyberbullying phenomenon.
First of all, bullies do not have a gender. Namely, they are, equally, girls or boys: the research showed that 50.3% of the authors of acts of digital harassment are male and 49.7% female. They are aged between 13 and 19 years old, and the actions they most frequently carried out were silent phone calls, prank phone calls or, otherwise, intentionally excluding someone from online groups. To do so, they mainly use group chats and private messages (WhatsApp, Telegram and similar applications).
According to the respondents, the offenders are anxious, insecure and generally part of a known group of young people who mainly target those who cannot defend themselves or have a physical disability.
According to the survey results, the prevailing opinion among young people is that real identity and virtual identity are two different entities, just like reality and virtual reality. This double personality, where the consequences of one’s actions are exclusively attributed to the online user profile, justifies, to a certain extent, the behaviour that can be attributed to Cyberbullying.
At this stage, it can be considered that the virtual identity is the complex system of images, videos and written information that the Internet user has published in a social network to represent himself as a unique and unmistakable digital person; the posts, photos and videos that are shared are, therefore, the Virtual Identity and speak about the personality, character, values and mindset of the Internet user.
Moreover, virtual reality, together with objects, people, animals, plants, things, emotions and desires, is an element of the so-called ‘reality class’.
The students’ struggle to conceptualise virtual reality shows despite 89.1% (3,196) of students believing that cyberbullying is a crime, 80.3% (2,879) having dealt with the problem of digital harassment at school and almost 50% of victims of digital harassment reporting having experienced very negative emotions. In short, the actual phenomenon, as reflected in its external (disciplinary and judicial) and internal effects (negative emotional states), did not help to understand that the term virtual reality is not an oxymoron, nor is it above all synonymous with fake or artificial reality.
Furthermore, it should be noted that not even the experience of distance learning (the teacher speaking through a screen is virtual and therefore real) or the reported cases in the press of people prosecuted for virtual crimes (from defamation to threats and unauthorised disclosure of intimate/sexual content) have allowed teachers, parents and students understanding that virtual is not an alternative class to the reality one, but a part of it, together with objects, people, animals, plants, emotions and desires. As a result, many young people are more likely to engage in cyberbullying because they see the virtual as a fake, unreal, artificial space.
Victims
Girls between 15 and 19 were the primary victims of cyberbullying. One in five (19.6%) said they had been cyberbullied, ‘rarely’ in 10.3% of cases, ‘sometimes’ in 7.8% and ‘often’ in 1.5%. The most frequent bullying behaviours were silent phone calls, prank phone calls and intentionally excluding someone from online groups. As a result of one or more of these incidents, which also happened very often to boys, the victims felt lonely, lost self-esteem, lived in anxiety and isolated themselves. Consequently, those who suffered such actions felt angry, lost the will to go to school and started to feel depressed all the time. In these cases, the children would have wanted advice from their parents but could not always communicate with them; instead, they talked about it with friends and schoolmates.
Audience
As in the case of bullying, also cyberbullying has an audience, in this case a virtual one, who witnesses it. The interviews showed that mainly girls between 15 and 19 witnessed such incidents. They felt pity and anger for the victim and disapproved – unable to take a stand – without taking action. They were also aware that such acts were criminal.
Parents
The survey results, which involved 1,361 parents across the island, while not free from contradictions, described a highly significant context of the topic. Respondents said they first gave their children mobile phones between 6 and 11, often checking their content. In addition, they provided them with a computer connected to the Internet in a common area of the house; in this case, the device was also monitored through ‘Parental Control’, meaning the tool that allows them to monitor or block access to certain online activities.
When their children were victims of cyberbullying, they adopted a series of behaviours. The most frequent:
– they advised them to ignore the bullying behaviour;
– they talked to school staff about it;
– they approached the parents of the offenders directly;
– they tried to better understand the situation by talking to their children.
The general opinion among all parents interviewed was that such episodes require adult intervention and that this is a worrying and growing phenomenon. They were also very restrictive about Internet: they prevented their children from communicating with unknown people, from revealing personal data on the Internet, from meeting people they knew online, from staying connected for too long, from accessing certain websites, etc.
However, the most striking feature emerging from the interviews was the prevailing opinion that virtual identity and real identity are not the same things. Moreover, parents believe that reality and virtual reality are two different things. There was a lack of essential awareness that what is done to the online identity exactly corresponds to reality. Overall, the lack of understanding of reality and virtual identity concepts not only allowed the young cyberbullies to build up a sort of digital psychological immunity. As a result, they were unable to become aware of the damaging effects of digital harassment on their peers’ lives but also allowed the victims’ parents to underestimate the impact of cyberbullying, as the most frequent suggestion given to their children was to “ignore these behaviours”.
Teachers
From the interviews carried out with teachers, it emerged that a small part of the interviewees had been victims of Cyberbullying and had turned to the school staff. When pupils were cyberbullied, teachers suggested that they turn to their parents, or teachers went directly to the person or persons responsible. When these incidents occurred, teachers found it very difficult to make pupils aware of the gravity of their actions, as they claimed that the offenders were not aware of the extent of the situation, believing that it was just a joke between young people.
Overall, most respondents felt that cyberbullying is a worrying and growing phenomenon, and that it always requires adult intervention. They also stated that the best way to defend children from the dangers of the Internet is to talk in class about the web’s risks. Nevertheless, they argued that real identity and virtual identity are two different concepts and that reality and virtual reality are not the same things. Not only young people but also adults have therefore mistakenly assumed that it is only possible e to alter recognisable characteristics and reveal personality traits that one does not possess on the web. Consequently, the general rule that real and virtual identities are different may follow.
Possible interventions
The research revealed, more than others, some of the phenomenon’s distinctive features, namely:
– the perception of being invisible through actions that are hidden behind technology;
– the absence of a visible victim’s response, so that it is impossible for the offender can’t see their actions;
– the ‘splitting of the personality results in attributing one’s actions to the user profile created online.
These peculiarities have been strengthened and, in a certain sense, justified by the belief – not only among children but also among parents and teachers – that reality and virtual reality are two different things, just as virtual identity and real identity are different things.
Therefore, based on this assumption, it is possible to affirm that the fight against cyberbullying could benefit from tools such as, for example, training activities addressed to teachers and students, recurrent information events addressed to parents by experts in the field in order to provide the social operators and children with guidelines to identify and cope with all the dynamics that may lead to abusive behaviour.
It would also be advisable for such training to take place in schools which, as the survey also showed, are the places not only where the phenomenon originates, but where it can best be countered. Law 71/2017, for instance, gives the School Institution a fundamental role in prevention, in close educational compliance with the family.
