New Study Shows Old-Fashioned Bullying is More Harmful Than Cyberbullying

Despite a heightened awareness of cyberbullying – complete with no shortage of campaigns against it – a new study has found that old-fashioned, in-person bullying is actually more harmful.

Researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that cyberbullying may actually be less disturbing to victimized youth because it’s often of shorter duration and doesn’t involve significant power imbalances.

Researchers analyzed data from the Technology Harassment Victimization Study, funded by the National Institute of Justice. Their focus was on telephone interviews with 791 American youth between the ages of 10 and 20.

Thirty-four per cent of interview subjects reported 311 incidents of harassment in the previous year. Interestingly, 54 per cent were strictly in-person, 15 per cent involved technology, and 31 per cent involved a combination of the two.

The incidents that involved technology not only were more likely to involve a large group of witnesses, but they were also least likely to involve multiple perpetrators, according to the study. The technology-only incidents were more likely to involve strangers or anonymous perpetrators (which is pretty disturbing in itself), which was found to be less distressing to youth than harassment by kids at school and other known acquaintances.

Not surprisingly, technology-only incidents were less likely than in-person only incidents to result in injury. They are also less likely to involve a social power imbalance or to occur numerous times.

“Mixed episodes, those that involved both in-person and technology elements, were more likely than technology-only episodes to involve perpetrators who knew embarrassing things about the victim, happen a series of times, last for one month or longer, involve physical injury and start out as joking before becoming more serious. It is these mixed episodes that appear to be the most distressing to youth,” said lead researcher Kimberly J. Mitchell, PhD, who is with the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Previously, researchers have assumed that technology-based bullying would be more damaging to victims because online bullies can attack anonymously at any time, and to large audiences. The findings reveal, however, that technology by itself does not necessarily heighten the severity and level of distress associated with harassment.

According to the study, factors like duration, power imbalance, injury, sexual content, involvement of multiple perpetrators, and hate comments are particularly common. The study marks a departure from previous research on cyberbullying, which has mostly been conducted separate from or parallel to research about in-person bullying.

The conclusion is that there should be a heightened focus on incidents of harassment that involve both in-person and technology elements.

Personally, that’s not to say that hurtful comments made by anonymous strangers won’t have a lasting impact. Though (thankfully) cyberbullying wasn’t a thing when I was in high school, the old-fashioned version of it was, of course, the bathroom wall.

Though I was never bullied in person, I can still vividly recall the sickening feeling of reading something about me on the bathroom wall on the last day of the school year in grade nine. I can still envision the sloppy penmanship and never did find out who wrote it – sometimes the anonymity makes it worse as you anxiously question who the culprit could possibly be.

The good news is that studies like this exist in the first place. By the time our future kids are in school, the hope is that bullying will become as vilified in our schools and playgrounds as racism.