Chapter 7
The digital shift
For much of the history we have explored, bullying had a physical geography. It happened in classrooms, playgrounds, corridors, changing rooms, streets and journeys to and from school. A young person might dread returning the next morning, but going home could at least create some distance.
Digital technology began to change that.
By the early 2000s, mobile phones, text messages, email and internet access were becoming ordinary parts of young people's lives. In fact, the change can be seen in government anti-bullying material itself. The Department for Education and Skills pack Don't Suffer in Silence did not mention cyberbullying in its 2000 edition, but the 2002 revision included malicious emails and text messages. Only a few years separated a largely offline understanding of bullying from one in which technology could no longer be ignored.
The school day no longer ends at the school gate
Mobile phone ownership among young people increased rapidly. Research cited by Peter K. Smith and colleagues reported that by 2006 around 51 per cent of UK ten year olds and 91 per cent of twelve year olds had a mobile phone. Early research initially concentrated on unpleasant text messages and emails, but phone calls, instant messaging, photographs, video clips, websites and social networking were quickly widening the possibilities.
For someone experiencing bullying, this changed something fundamental. The person causing harm no longer needed to be physically present, and home was no longer necessarily a place where contact stopped.
A message could arrive in a bedroom.
A photograph could travel through a school without the person in it knowing who had seen it.
Something humiliating could be waiting on a screen before breakfast and still be circulating long after school finished.
Is cyberbullying a different kind of bullying?
As the language cyberbullying became established, researchers and practitioners debated whether technology had created an entirely new kind of behaviour.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families offered a useful distinction in its 2007 Safe to Learn guidance. It described cyberbullying as a method of bullying rather than a separate type. Technology could be used for verbal, relational, discriminatory or other forms of bullying just as those behaviours could take place face to face.
That remains an interesting way to think about the digital shift.
The technology was new.
Many of the underlying behaviours were not.
Humiliation, exclusion, threats, rumours, intimidation and the abuse of power existed before mobile phones and social media. What technology changed was the way those behaviours could be carried out and the scale they could sometimes achieve.
What does repetition mean online?
Digital bullying also complicated one of the oldest ingredients in definitions of bullying: repetition.
Imagine that somebody uploads one humiliating photograph.
They only press the button once.
But the image is viewed fifty times, copied, forwarded, commented on and shown to other people.
Has the behaviour happened once?
Or has the experience been repeated every time the image reaches another audience?
This is one reason digital bullying became important to the wider debate about definitions. Technology could allow one act to acquire a life beyond the original action.
The same question appears in our What is Bullying? section and its exploration of different definitions.
The audience becomes much bigger
We saw in the previous chapters that bullying can operate as a group process. Digital communication could make that group far larger.
The audience was no longer necessarily the handful of young people standing nearby. People could view, share, forward, comment on or react to material without ever being physically present when the original event happened.
Government recognised this problem quite explicitly. In 2007 an online campaign associated with the Safe to Learn work used the message “Laugh at it and you're part of it”, drawing attention to the way viewing, forwarding and reacting to offensive material could help sustain the bullying.
The old question about the bystander therefore became more complicated.
What does it mean to witness bullying when the witness is holding a phone?
Anonymous, but not always
Digital spaces also changed perceptions of power.
Someone could sometimes hide behind an anonymous account, an unfamiliar username or a false identity. A person who felt unable to intimidate somebody face to face might feel much more powerful online.
But research also complicated the idea of a mysterious anonymous cyberbully. A major UK study published in 2008 found that much cyberbullying was carried out by one or a few pupils, commonly from the same year group as the person experiencing it. Digital bullying could feel anonymous, but it was often deeply connected with existing offline relationships.
Online and offline bullying were therefore not two completely separate worlds.
They could feed each other.
The camera changes things
Phones increasingly became cameras as well as communication devices.
That created another possibility. An act of humiliation could be recorded, replayed and distributed. During the 2000s the term “happy slapping” was widely used for assaults or humiliating incidents deliberately filmed and circulated through mobile phones.
Smith and colleagues found that bullying involving photographs or video clips was less common than some other forms of cyberbullying in their study, but pupils perceived it as potentially having a particularly serious impact.
Again, the technology changed more than the immediate incident.
A physical event might last seconds.
Its digital version could remain.
But digital bullying can leave evidence too
Technology created risks, but it also changed what could be known about bullying.
A cruel comment in a corridor may leave no record.
A text message might.
Messages, photographs, timestamps and account details could sometimes provide evidence of what had happened. This did not make digital bullying easy to resolve, and material could still be deleted, altered or taken out of context, but it gave young people, parents and schools forms of evidence that often did not exist in face to face situations.
That creates one of the many contradictions of the digital shift.
The same technology that can amplify harmful behaviour can sometimes help expose it.
Research catches up
By 2007 the UK government had published dedicated cyberbullying material as part of its Safe to Learn guidance, including advice about prevention, responsible technology use and responding to harmful material online. Parliamentary discussion that year was already citing surveys suggesting substantial numbers of young people had experienced bullying through phones or the internet.
In 2008, Peter K. Smith, Jess Mahdavi, Manuel Carvalho, Sonja Fisher, Shanette Russell and Neil Tippett published an important UK study examining seven forms of cyberbullying among pupils aged 11 to 16. They found that cyberbullying was less common than traditional bullying in their samples but nevertheless significant, and much of it occurred outside school. Phone calls and text messages were among the most common forms at the time.
The phrase “at the time” matters.
Technology does not stand still.
Text messages gave way to increasingly sophisticated social networking, image sharing, video platforms, group chats and other forms of digital communication. Particular platforms rise and fall, but the underlying challenge remains.
Anti-bullying work has had to keep adapting to technologies that change much faster than policies or research can sometimes follow.
A change of place, or a change of scale?
Perhaps the biggest historical shift was not simply that bullying moved online.
Digital technology changed where, when, how far and how long an act could travel.
It could extend beyond school hours, reach an audience that was difficult to see, allow material to be reproduced and blur the distinction between an incident happening once and being experienced repeatedly.
Yet many of the questions remained familiar.
Who has power? Who is being harmed? Who is watching? Who joins in? Who speaks? Who acts?
And who is responsible when something that begins outside school arrives inside it the next morning?
That final question takes us into another part of the history.
As public concern grew, governments and courts increasingly had to decide how existing law applied to behaviour that might be called bullying even though bullying itself is not usually a criminal offence in its own right.