Anna Costanza Baldry - International Perspectives on Cyberbullying : Prevalence, Risk Factors and Interventions

This book series addresses the urgent need to advance knowledge in the fields of cybercrime and cybersecurity. Because the exponential expansion of computer technologies and use of the Internet have greatly increased the access by criminals to people, institutions, and businesses around the globe, the series will be international in scope. It provides a home for cutting-edge long-form research. Further, the series seeks to spur conversation about how traditional criminological theories apply to the online environment. The series welcomes contributions from early career researchers as well as established scholars on a range of topics in the cybercrime and cybersecurity fields.

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Cyberbullying, together with other kinds of risks on social media and the internet, is an emergent problem of this century. Even if the phenomenon itself was reported in the 1990s (sometimes called by other names such as electronic aggression), public awareness of the issue, and research on the topic, only really emerged in the early 2000s. Surveys of publications on cyberbullying (Zych et al. 2015; Smith and Berkkun 2017) demonstrate an exponential increase over the last 15 years. Smith and Berkkun (2017), analyzing Web of Science publications from 2000 to 2015, found an average number of 33.6 articles per year; but this built up from a very slow start during the first 7 years of this century, then increased rapidly: from 2000 to 2006, a small trickle of articles (range 0 to 5 per year); from 2007 to 2011, a substantial but still modest number of articles (range 14 to 38 per year); but from 2012 on, a very large number of articles (range 85 to 131 per year). The year 2015 saw 131 articles, or about 2.5 new articles every week. Most articles (454 in all) reported empirical data, with 30 of these (9%) providing information on resources and interventions.

Although a life-span phenomenon, most of the research and attention on cyberbullying has been on children and young people, where it appears most prevalent. We know that involvement in cyberbullying, notably as a victim but also as a bystander or perpetrator, has negative consequences for all those involved, and also for the school climate (Kowalski et al. 2014; Astor and Benbenishty in press; and many chapters in this book). So what has the increased public awareness and the increased research effort achieved? There are certainly now more resources for young people, teachers and parents, mainly on websites or in the form of leaflets and advice packs. Are these helping to reduce the problem?

Some media hype about an increasing epidemic of cyberbullying is overstated. Obviously, the prevalence of cyberbullying has increased in this century, as penetration of the internet has increased, and smartphones became readily available from 2007. However, the evidence about changes in prevalence from recent years is mixed (see also Chap. ). A partial follow-up of the EU Kids Online study, which assessed cyberbullying rates in 25 European countries in 2010, was reported by Mascheroni and Cuman (2014). In all seven countries in the follow-up, cyber victimization rates were somewhat higher in 2013 than in 2010, the average increasing from 9% to 12%. In contrast, a 10-year longitudinal study in 109 schools in Maryland, USA, found some increase in cyber victimization scores from 2005/06 to 2009/10 (from around 6% to 8%) but then a decline to 2013/14 (to around 5%) (Waasdorp et al. 2017).

While much has been done to understand and prevent cyberbullying, much more remains to be done. This book makes a significant contribution to such ongoing efforts. The Tabby online project described in Chap.. Although unfortunately there is no one silver bullet to stop cyberbullying, the 10 silver bullet recommendations in this final chapter are succinct and sensible. They deserve to be widely discussed and implemented. The editors are to be congratulated in bringing together this valuable collection and in drawing out such important policy recommendations for the future.