Cyberbullying: experiences and proposals of university students

Abstract

The rapid growth of ICT has brought many benefits, but certainly also many damages, one of them being cyberbullying, which is taking more and more strength in our society. The main interest in this research was to know the perception and experience of a group of young university students about cyberbullying in their student stage at the secondary education context. To carry out this research, we had the participation of 864 students of six universities in the northeast of Spain. A quantitative methodology of non-experimental type character survey has been used and, in particular, sampling non-probability has been used, accidental or incidental, conditioned by the availability of subjects to participate in this research. Most of the students in our study indicated not having suffered ciberbullying or exercising it in his student stage both in state and private schools. Written aggression (insults/offenses or threats) was the most common type of violent action among the aggressors, and the dissemination of personal information or rumors. The majority of young people, who suffered harassment in the school in our study, acknowledged that they did not feel motivated to attend sessions at the time, nor to develop their studies in an adequate way, isolating themselves socially.