Abstract
Cyberbullying has been portrayed as a rising ‘epidemic’ amongst children and adolescents. But does it create many new victims beyond those already bullied with traditional means (physical, relational)? Our aim was to determine whether cyberbullying creates uniquely new victims, and whether it has similar impact upon psychological and behavioral outcomes for adolescents, beyond those experienced by traditional victims. This study assessed 2745 pupils, aged 11–16, from UK secondary schools. Pupils completed an electronic survey that measured bullying involvement, self-esteem and behavioral problems. Twenty-nine percent reported being bullied but only 1% of adolescents were pure cyber-victims (i.e., not also bullied traditionally). Compared to direct or relational victims, cyber-victimization had similar negative effects on behavior (z = −0.41) and self-esteem (z = −0.22) compared to those not involved in bullying. However, those bullied by multiple means (poly-victims) had the most difficulties with behavior (z = −0.94) and lowest self-esteem (z = −0.78). Cyberbullying creates few new victims, but is mainly a new tool to harm victims already bullied by traditional means. Cyberbullying extends the reach of bullying beyond the school gate. Intervention strategies against cyberbullying may need to include approaches against traditional bullying and its root causes to be successful.
Highlights
Harm victims already bullied by traditional means
How many cybervictims are bullied by traditional means? Juvonen and Gross [8] found that 85% of cyber-victims were traditional victims
The a priori comparisons comparing pure cyber-victims (pure CV) to the other victim types revealed that pure CV had significantly higher self-esteem (p = .008) and fewer total difficulties on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (p = .034) than poly-victims (DV, relational victimization (RV), & CV), but their outcomes were not significantly different from the other victim types
Summary
Harm victims already bullied by traditional means. Cyberbullying extends the reach of bullying beyond the school gate. Olweus [5] reported on two studies showing co-occurrence of traditional and cyberbullying of 88–93% and similar rates were recently reported by others [10, 11] This suggests that 9 out of 10 adolescents who report experience of cyber-victimization are bullied by traditional forms of bullying [6, 12]. Such considerable overlap rates may further account, at least in part, for the considerable variation in prevalence reported for cyberbullying and strongly suggests that cyberbullying is an extension of traditional bullying, i.e., it is a new weapon for bullies to use against targets they bully at school
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