Cyber bullying who is to blame

Schools should involve themselves in the disciplinary process when cyberbullying does occur amongst students. To this end, many schools have set up anonymous bully reporting forms, sites and hotlines.

Technology can help, too. Content filters often miss incidents of online bullying. Computer word and phrase monitoring provides actionable evidence to help schools intervene by helping bullies to change their behavior and keeping victims safe. Platforms, users, parents and schools must be vigilant in finding new ways to prevent cyberbullying. They must also create an environment that seeks to protect victims and will punish bullies. Left unchecked, this kind of behavior will only grow and can have disastrous — even fatal — consequences.

Who Is Responsible for Stopping Cyberbullying? The Platform: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the three most popular social media platforms.

The Parents: Parents find themselves in one of the best positions to identify if their child has experienced or participated in cyberbullying. A new research published in Computers in Human Behavior links the amount of blame the victim receives to the aspect of social attractiveness.

Cyber bullying is now increasingly being seen as a public health crisis in Australia. In fact, approximately one-third of kids has experienced cyber bullying. However, only a few report the incidents to adults or the authorities. This can lead to more victims experiencing depression and anxiety, sometimes with life-threatening results.

The new research attempted to understand and go deeper into this issue. While it is true that there are some things that can help deter bullying, like developing social skills and building self-esteem, the truth is that anyone can become a victim of bullying. The responsibility for bullying always belongs to the bully.

Yet many people still engage in victim-blaming and assert that the victim brought about the bullying in some way. Bullying is never the target's fault.

Victims do not need to change or be different in some way to avoid being bullied. Change is always the bully's responsibility. To keep from blaming the victim for a bullying incident, familiarize yourself with the top six ways that people blame victims for bullying. Make sure you avoid believing these myths about victims. Many times, when people hear that someone has been bullied, they have trouble empathizing with what the victim experienced, especially if the victim has negative or annoying personality traits.

Despite whether victims are conceited, rude, inconsiderate or selfish, no one deserves to be bullied. This mindset only condones bullying behaviors. Many times people will point out what is wrong with the victim rather than recognizing that the real problem lies with the bully and his choices. People often find it easier to tell a victim how he should change in order to avoid being bullied than to place the responsibility on the bully. While there are certain life skills that are important for victims of bullying to learn, like resilience , perseverance, and assertiveness , lacking these skills is not a reason to excuse bullying.

For example, bully-victims are caught in this vicious cycle. They are consistently bullied and rather than dealing with the situation in a healthy way, they lash out by bullying others. After entering the questionnaire via the landing page, participants were exposed to a fictive cyberbullying incident with the severity of the incident as the independent variable.

We chose the information about the victim and the context according to the results of prior research, again following suggestions from Allison and Bussey As it was our aim to test whether the severity of cyberbullying incidents could hamper victim blaming as a key moral disengagement mechanism, we created a scenario that, according to prior research, was likely to provoke victim blaming.

We presented the scenario as follows: Thomas was not very popular among his classmates, and they often made jokes about his personal hygiene. After Thomas had worn the same t-shirt for several days, his classmates began to harass him by posting messages on his Facebook wall.

In one version of this scenario less severe , the bullies left comments containing insults and asking Thomas to change his t-shirt e. In the second version more severe , these insulting comments were augmented with threats against Thomas e. You had better go die! Put simply, one stimulus version only contained insults, whereas the second version contained insults and threats.

In doing so, we aimed to create stimulus versions that differed in their degree of severity with respect to the incident that we presented to the participants. This seemed plausible given the fact that—as opposed to the insults—the threats indicated explicitly that there was potential physical harm to the victim and thus may have qualified as an assault according to U.

The authors of the comments, the overall number of comments, the number of likes for each comment and the general information on the fictive Facebook profile were kept similar across treatment conditions. In sum, our scenario was characterized by the typical features of online victimization as they are conceptualized on the basis of the reduced social cues approach, cf. From the perspective of a bystander observing the incident, one could assume that the victim did not know that she or he had seen the derogatory comments.

After being exposed to the cyberbullying incident, we asked the participants to evaluate the severity of the incident, their tendency to blame the victim, and whether they would be willing to help the victim.

All items for each question were randomized to prevent biases due to the order of items. Finally, we debriefed the participants about the fictive nature of the incident and all of the persons involved in it. Ethical Aspects. Since the study is based on an online-experiment, one might raise the question what information was given at which point in time to our participants and how other ethical aspects were handled. First, we fully complied with the American Psychological Association APA ethical standards as well as with research guidelines provided by the German research foundation country, where the study was conducted.

Right in the beginning of the study, on the landing page, participants were informed about the length of the questionnaire, they were given contact information to the authors of the study, they were informed that participation was voluntary and that they could opt out at any time, and that all the data was collected anonymously and for scientific inquiry only. As such, participation in the study was voluntary, open to everybody, no registration was required, and we did not offer any incentives.

With respect to the issue of our study, participants were informed in general terms that they were participating in a survey on the topic of cyberbullying. Yet, the fictive nature of the incident was not disclosed to them until the very end of the experiment i. We decided to use only complete data sets i.

Perceived severity. We asked participants to evaluate the severity of the incident via seven semantic differentials on 5-point scales.

Victim blaming. Willingness to help. The items covered a wide range of possible intervention strategies that differed primarily in whether the assistance was given privately or publicly e.

However, the result was a one-factor solution principal component analysis, oblique rotation [i. Thus, the participants seemed to regard public and private support measures in a comparable way, suggesting that we calculate one aggregate index from all the items.

Sociodemographic variables. Data Analysis. Preliminary Analysis. In what follows, we present a descriptive analysis of our data before moving on to hypothesis testing. We include the means, standard deviations, reliability scores, and bivariate correlations for the main variables in Table 1.

The participants in both treatment conditions evaluated the incident as relatively severe if one considers that 5 was the scale maximum. The tendency to blame the victim was comparably low in both treatment conditions, and there were no significant differences between the two groups. All the correlations indicated a medium-large effect size. We aimed to investigate how bystanders evaluate and interpret cyberbullying incidents and how they—based on these considerations—formed their intention to help.

Thus, we ran ANOVAs as a preliminary analysis to compare whether participants with different experiences never vs. Those who had seen such an incident only once in their lifetime did not differ significantly from the other two groups. Table 1. Treatment Condition. Willing-ness to help. Hypotheses Testing. We also estimated the direct effects of the type of incident on victim blaming and willingness to help the victim in order to estimate a full model.

In sum, if the victim of the cyberbullying incident was attacked with threats and insults, participants perceived the incident as more severe, which made them more likely to support the victimized person. Therefore, victims of cyberbullying incidents that bystanders perceive as not very severe run a higher risk of being assigned a part of the blame for the incident. Participants who were more prone to blaming the victim were also more reluctant to assist the victim.

The total indirect effect i. The two indirect effects of incident severity on willingness to help were significant despite the fact that neither victim blaming nor willingness to help overall differed between treatment conditions see the preliminary analysis.

This is because the two direct effects from incident severity on victim blaming and willingness to help, though insignificant, masked the indirect effects in the simple group comparison. Figure 1. Similar to Obermaier et al. This, in turn, correlates with a higher intention to intervene among our participants in their role as bystanders, which is in line with Bastiaensens et al. Additionally, the more severe a bystander evaluates the perpetration to be, the less she or he ascribes blame to the victim, which is regarded as a key component of moral disengagement DeSmet et al.

Weber et al. Consequently, victims of presumably less severe incidents in particular are at risk of being blamed because potential bystanders do not evaluate these situations as critical or problematic. In such situations, they feel less responsible for intervening and participate more intensely in moral disengaging, which is linked to a lower willingness to help the victim comparable to Obermaier et al. The actual consequences of the incident may still be devastating.

Here, bystanders who do not help the victim but instead inflict even more hurt substantially contribute to a lasting experience of victimization Campbell et al. Notwithstanding, we must note some limitations to consider when interpreting our results. Our sample is considerably biased toward the higher educational strata. Being more familiar with different types and also the consequences of cyberbullying might result in a higher sensitivity toward seemingly less severe incidents.

This also holds true for the participants in our sample. Participants who had observed a cyberbullying incident several times in the past rated the incident as significantly more severe than participants who had never seen such an attack of online victimization.

Consequently, further research with a more educationally diverse sample is needed. The same applies for the evaluation criteria we used to assess the severity of the online victimization.

This comparably broad measurement of perceived severity was motivated by our aim to cover very different considerations among bystanders when evaluating the severity of victimization online e. However, investigating the relative relevance of different evaluation criteria could enhance our understanding of how intentions to help are formed.