New Directions in Intervention: Cyber-Bullying, Schools and Teachers

Abstract

Many of the most serious challenges that teachers face through their work in schools are related to violence, bullying and harassment among their students. Indeed, together, these challenges have come to define a growing literature in the psychological and educational sciences. This literature encompasses both physical and psychological variants of these social phenomena. This chapter focuses on bullying. The development of information and communication technology over the last two or three decades has allowed bullying to be even more destructively expressed in the school context by the use of social media. This chapter looks at cyber-bullying in the school context. Its focus is teachers and their role, at the front line, in handling this problem. It begins by discussing what is and what is not cyber-bullying and then presents a narrative review of the evidence on the risk that it poses to student well-being, broadly defined, and performance. It establishes the prevalence of the problem, although the data are very varied, and the nature and magnitude of its effects. In doing so, it notes the growing but small literature on the cyber-bullying of teachers themselves. It argues that teachers need to understand the nature of the risk so that they can deal with it through the use of prevention and management strategies. It provides a brief account of the legal and policy contexts, in the U.K. and U.S., for action at school-level. Finally, it looks at the emergent literature on intervention strategies and concludes with a suggestion for a four-point generic strategy based on the information that is currently available.