The youth on-line life: risks, violence and support networks

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper presents the results of an online survey carried out by five Italian Universities to investigate the cyber violence phenomenon between young people aged between 19 and 25 (2365 valid questionnaires). The web transforms social relationships because it moves them out of the ‘real’ context and places them in an undefined space–time dimension where, the identity dimension does not pass only through being passive users but active builders of content and relationships. The web is not without risks, including the well-known phenomenon of cyberviolence. The data collected allow us to focus on formal and informal networks (ref. family and school) that young people activate between real and virtual life to cope with the risks and problems arising from the phenomena of cyberviolence. Within the analysis we adopted a gender approach useful to emphasize the different forms of violence that can be characterized by male and female points of view. In the conclusions we also focus on interventions that can be put in place to address this problem by imagining the characteristics of an alliance between institutions (family and school) that could represent a safety network for boys and girls starting from the awareness of the risks that the network can offer.