Cyber Harassment and Quality of Life

Abstract

Research on bullying and harassment in Scandinavia has been going on for several decades, and is appearing in new frameworks and forms since the new categories of “cyber harassment” or “cyberbullying” has been introduced. Bullying is a phenomenon of great importance, as it seems to affect persons negatively in their everyday functioning. <br>We designed a questionnaire on cyber harassment, which was answered by pupils, at five schools in Tromsø (N=878). This questionnaire included a section of questions concerning traditional forms of harassment and bullying, as well as a set of quality of life (QoL) questions. The main questions asked here are: 1) What is the prevalence in percentages of classical bullying and cyberbullying; 2) Are there gender and/or age differences; 3) What percentage of children bullied classically were also cyber-bullied; 4) In what way was the quality of life affected for those that were classically bullied or cyber-bullied? <br>Our main finding is that students who report being cyber-harassed or cyber-bullied, report a significantly lower QoL-score than their non-harassed peers, and thus share the same negative characteristics in relation to quality of life as classical harassment and bullying. Cyberbullying is less common than classical bullying, but it now affects some 3.5% of the pupils, and nearly half of the cyberbullying comes in addition to traditional bullying.