Victims, perpetrators, and bystanders: A meta-ethnography of roles in cyberbullying

Abstract

Cyberbullying is a form of online aggression between peers, the prevalence of which varies from 10% to 40% according to studies in different countries. A large share of the scientific literature on cyberbullying tends to individualize and medicalize the causes of the violence, without understanding the context in which it takes place or the meanings it acquires for those who practice it. The study aims to understand the beliefs, values, and practices that adolescents mobilize in performing the roles involved in cyberbullying. The study was conducted as a meta-ethnography, aimed at producing a synthesis of qualitative studies based on the theoretical interpretation of their basic findings. The study's corpus consisted of 33 articles selected from the BVS, PubMed, SciELO, and Scopus databases. The results include a description of expressions of cyberbullying, motivations, and adolescents' experiences as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. With symbolic interactionism as the theoretical reference, we found that cyberbullying is a unique expression of online sociability. We contend that its practice is associated with identity-building processes, based on mechanisms of peer identification and opposition by which the participants also reproduce and compete for positions of recognition in their sociability. In this process, cyberbullying sanctions behaviors that transgress a dominant symbolic order for adolescence.