The New Era of Cyberbullying

Teachers need to help make an environment that promotes student interaction and cooperation under supervision. This is important so that a teacher can be aware of his/her student's interactions and encourage students to work together inside the classroom, so that they can learn to continue to do so outside of it.
             Those Affected.
             Cyberbullying can occur at any place and anytime; it has multiple means of execution such as internet chat rooms, networking sites (i.e., Myspace and Facebook), text messages, e-mails, and many other means. Cyberbullying has become a growing problem in recent years due to the new technological advances in society and children are using these technologies to their fullest extent. In a study by Li (2007), a survey of 177 seventh graders was taken in an urban school and 54 percent of students said that they had been victims of traditional bullying, and one in every four admitted to being cyber-bullied. The study showed that 60 percent of the victims of cyberbullying were female, while 52 percent of the actual cyber-bullies were male (Li, 2007).
             From Li's study one can conclude that cyberbullying affects a large percentage of students. Also, it shows that young females are more likely to become targets, and males are more likely to execute cyberbullying acts. Seeing that Li surveyed seventh graders one can assume that as the years progress and these students go off to high school, the rate of those being bullied (and those who participate in bullying) will only increase. To back up Li's research there has been more studies done on the subject and these surveys have included the high school ages, and the results have remained constant, with cyberbullying occurring more as the sample size increased.
             In this larger study, Bernie Froese-Germain took a survey of over 2,100 students in Grades 6-11 from 32 schools from around the Greater Toronto Area.