Widespread mobile phone use is driving cyberbullying

One harm­ful ef­fect of the spread of mo­bile phones among the young is the emer­gence of new ways of ha­rass­ing each other, often from the anonymity that mo­bile de­vices make pos­si­ble. Cy­ber­bul­ly­ing, as it has come to be known, is a prob­lem that af­fects a high per­cent­age of young peo­ple, in­clud­ing chil­dren, and is re­plac­ing con­ven­tional bul­ly­ing.

The lat­est b-resol re­view, com­piled in the last school year by the BCN Resol start-up, sur­veyed more than 3,200 sec­ondary school pupils and found that 1.7% ad­mit­ted to being vic­tims of cy­ber­bul­ly­ing, while 3.6% re­ported being vic­tims of con­ven­tional bul­ly­ing. Prior to the pan­demic, the per­cent­age of young peo­ple who said they had ex­pe­ri­enced cy­ber­bul­ly­ing was 1.1%, which sug­gests that the lock­downs and the change of rou­tines as­so­ci­ated with coro­n­avirus have made this harm­ful be­hav­iour worse.

The co-founder and gen­eral man­ager of BCN Resol, Josep Fígols, ex­plains that cy­ber­bul­ly­ing is not only grow­ing but “be­com­ing more so­phis­ti­cated”. “Un­like con­ven­tional bul­ly­ing,” he ex­plains, “it’s more repet­i­tive, there’s no time limit: it’s 24/7.” And Fígols points out an­other prob­lem: “The lack of train­ing adults have in the dig­i­tal world and the fact that the role mod­els that many young peo­ple have are peo­ple of the same age.” The third b-resol re­view also con­cludes that one in four pupils ad­mits to hav­ing wit­nessed a case of bul­ly­ing or cy­ber­bul­ly­ing in the past year, and al­most half say they have done so dur­ing their en­tire school life.

How­ever, it is worth men­tion­ing that the fig­ures pro­vided by this sur­vey refer to schools run­ning pre­ven­tion and im­me­di­ate ac­tion pro­grammes de­signed by BCN Resol, which in­cludes the use of a mo­bile app to no­tify when an at­tack is de­tected. Other stud­ies show higher fig­ures for cy­ber­bul­ly­ing. The Anar Foun­da­tion, which helps chil­dren and teenagers at risk, finds that 36.5% of bul­ly­ing cases are car­ried out through a de­vice over the age of 13, and that 70% of cy­ber­bul­ly­ing vic­tims are girls. Unicef, mean­while, es­ti­mates that two out of ten teenagers are vic­tims of cy­ber­bul­ly­ing, and Un­esco data say that cy­ber­bul­ly­ing af­fected one in ten ado­les­cents in 2019.

While the fig­ures are wor­ry­ing, Fígols points to an­other prob­lem af­fect­ing young peo­ple that is even more alarm­ing: eat­ing dis­or­ders. Some 9.3% of re­spon­dents in the lat­est b-resol sur­vey said they had ex­pe­ri­enced an episode of anorexia or bu­limia in the past year, a 50% in­crease over the fig­ure for pre­vi­ous year, with 90% of those af­fected being girls.