Abstract

Our research team has developed the project Keeping youth safe from Cyberbullying under Erasmus+, that aims to deeper understand the dynamics of cyberbullying in online environments among youth, to develop educational resources for professionals involved in youth activities in order to prevent these type behaviours, to develop youth skills to protect themselves from cyberbullying and to disseminate findings among educational professionals. A 7 section online questionnaire was designed, aiming to gather descriptive data, general perception about the frequency and typology of cyberbullying type incidents, perceptions about the safety of the educational environment and parental support and an auto evaluation scale centred on self-efficacy perceptions. Data was collected from 92 participants. Present’s study interest is in analysing the relationship between perceived school safety and just-for-fun online harassment. In order to test our hypothesis that assumes that between perceived school safety and just-for-fun online harassment there is a dynamic relationship, we have used a confirmatory factor analysis, based on multiple regression analysis for curvilinear effects. Results confirm the dynamic relationship between perceived school safety and just-for-fun online harassment, meaning that the poorer and as well as the stronger school safety is perceived, just-for-fun online harassment is present in educational contexts; a fair school safety perception intrigues an almost non-existent just-for-fun online harassment among pupils/students. Qualitative results and cyberbullying prevention strategies are discussed.

Highlights

  • Cyberbullying takes part to a bigger phenomenon that was present before the development of social media, such as bullying which is described as an aggressive behavior, usually characterized by the following aspects: hostile intentions, imbalance of perceived power, and repetition of the hostile behavior (Burger et al, 2015)

  • This paper is concerned with analyzing the relationship between just-for-fun online harassment and perceived school safety, with regards to the fact that the scientific literature depicts implications on cyberbullying behavior based on how safe the educational environment feels like to youth

  • With the purpose of statistically testing our assumption stating that just-for-fun online harassment and perceived school safety are in a curvilinear relationship, we have computed a quadratic regression analysis for depicting curvilinear significant effects

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Summary

Introduction

Cyberbullying takes part to a bigger phenomenon that was present before the development of social media, such as bullying which is described as an aggressive behavior, usually characterized by the following aspects: hostile intentions, imbalance of perceived power, and repetition of the hostile behavior (Burger et al, 2015). As the modern civilization developed more and more, bullying started happening while using technological devices as tools to express hostile intentions to other individuals; bullying while using technological devices is known as cyberbullying,, a form of aggression used in the online environment, which implies repeated behaviors that have the intention to harm one or more individuals (Willard, 2005) These behaviors may be represented by posting negative rumors, threats, remarks with sexual content or personal information in the form of comments or messages, which can humiliate or cause harm to the victim (US Legal, https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/cyber-bullying/). Their psychological profile is characterized by impulsiveness, provocativeness, annoyed, not following the rules and having an over-rated self-image

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