Washington: Although verbal and physical bullying decreases as students grow older, cyberbullying increases. According to a recent study, native English speakers are bullied more often than non-native English speakers and bullying increases as student shifts from elementary to middle school.
The study by lead researcher Cixin Wang, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education found students who are bullied fall into four subgroups: frequent victim (11%), occasional traditional victim – verbal, physical and relational but not cyber (29%), occasional cyber and traditional victim (10%) and infrequent victim (50%).
The researchers also revealed that students who bully fall into three categories: frequent perpetrator (5%), occasional verbal or relational perpetrator (26%) and infrequent perpetrator (69%). While bullying victimisation and perpetration decreased over time, there was an increase from fifth to sixth grade, which corresponds with the transition from elementary to middle school.
It was also revealed that girls were more likely to experience verbal or relational and cyber victimisation than boys and boys were more likely to be physically victimized.
One million children were harassed, threatened or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying on Facebook during the past year, while 90% of social media-using teens who have witnessed online cruelty say they have ignored mean behavior on social media, and 35% have done this frequently.
There are laws that only address online harassment of children or focus on child predators as well as laws that protect adult cyberstalking victims, or victims of any age. Currently, there are 45 cyberstalking (and related) laws on the books.