Online Bullying: Annotated Bibliography

As children develop throughout their school years they learn how to independently behave in a social context. This allows them to form relationships with people outside of their immediate family. However, this can be challenged if bullying is encountered. Farrington (1993) (cited in Holliman and Critten, 2015, p. 75) describes face-to-face bullying as; physical, verbal and psychological attacks or intimidation intended to cause fear, distress or harm to the victim. Furthermore, he concludes the characteristics commonly involve an imbalance of power, are unprovoked and incidents are repeated over time. To help address teenage bullying online two psychological approaches will be evaluated. Firstly, a developmental approach will review how children

There are many positive attributions to the cyber world. However, there are also negatives and one of these is online bullying. Online bullying is an extension to Farrington’s bullying definition with the following additions: Firstly, online bullying is a pervasion at home and school. Secondly, it can reach a wider audience and thirdly, the perpetrators can be anonymous. A three-part study was conducted to understand how children perceive or experience cyberbullying (Tarapdar et al., 2011). They referred to cyberbullying as the harassment of others by means of digital technologies, with the aim of harming someone directly or indirectly. This included verbal abuse, malicious calls, embarrassing or humiliating someone on the internet. Their results revealed that the mode in which cyberbullying is experienced can differ depending on age, with older teenagers experiencing more severe cyber-attacks. The complexity involved with cyber bullying was also noted as there are various means for attacks, for example, emails, texts and chatrooms. Many of the children noted that learning about cyberbullying and how to protect themselves was best learnt at school. However, education in this matter was not widely spread across the country.

A division of social influence is conformity, which occurs when social influence develops from the compliance to group norms. Thus, the effects of social pressure can influence individual decisions. Many studies have examined why someone might do something different to the norm when they are influenced by the group. One of the most influential studies is Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment in 1971 (Gibson, 2015). Participants were split into guards and prisoners. Both sets of participants seemed to take on and go along with the role they were allocated and experienced a lack of individualisation. The guards mostly became oppressive, abusive and authoritarian, whilst the prisoners became withdrawn, despondent and accepting of their fate (Gibson, 2015). Moreover, as adolescence grow the peer group to which they belong can influence and shape their individual behaviour. Hinduja and Patchin (2013) examined cyberbullying and social influence to see if this affected adolescence behaviour. They surveyed high school children and mainly were interested in two questions. Firstly, if a child’s peer group cyber bullies are they more likely to cyber bully and secondly if there are serious consequences at home and at school would it make a child less likely to cyberbully. Their results found that the answer to both of these questions was a moderate yes.