Search Results (474)

Media representations play a key role in shaping how cyberbullying is understood, problematized, and regulated, particularly in relation to children and young people in the digital environment. While legal scholarship has extensively examined the criminalisation of cyberbullying, less attention has been paid to how these legal developments are reflected in media discourse. This study addresses this gap by analysing the relationship between criminal-law responses and media representations of cyberbullying in Hungary within a broader European context. The research combines a qualitative media discourse analysis of 82 articles from leading Hungarian online news portals (2024–2025) with a comparative legal analysis of criminalisation patterns across EU Member States and a descriptive examination of the Hungarian offence of “online aggression”. The findings identify three dominant media narratives—child protection and social problem framing, criminal justice framing, and regulatory discourse—of which the first is the most prevalent. The results also reveal a limited alignment between legal regulation and media representation, as criminal-law approaches to cyberbullying appear only marginally in media narratives, which instead emphasise prevention, awareness, and institutional responses. These findings suggest that media discourse not only reflects but also shapes societal understandings of cyberbullying, highlighting the importance of considering media narratives in the development and evaluation of legal and policy responses. Full article

This systematic review, following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, analyzes scientific literature on bullying and cyberbullying among adolescents (aged 12–16) in educational settings, focusing on ICT, smartphone hyperconnectivity, and emotional education. An exhaustive search across Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Dialnet, CSIC, SciELO, and Google Scholar identified 34 empirical studies. A narrative synthesis was performed due to methodological heterogeneity. The synthesized evidence suggests that cyberbullying frequently acts as a persistent extension of school violence, where continuous digital exposure makes it difficult for victims to emotionally disconnect. Empirical data indicate a concerning correlation between prolonged bullying and psychosocial distress, including self-harming behaviors and suicidal ideation. Furthermore, results highlight systemic gaps: heightened vulnerability is reported among girls and LGBTQ+ students, alongside disparities between public and state-subsidized schools regarding institutional involvement and emotional support resources. Educational implications suggest reactive protocols are insufficient. Evidence supports that systematic emotional education, enhancing socio-emotional skills like impulse control, empathy, self-esteem and emotional regulation, acts as a key protective factor. Consequently, fostering “digital emotional intelligence” emerges as a promising preventive educational strategy to protect adolescents’ well-being in hyperconnected environments. Full article

The scientific literature was reviewed to systematically identify and characterize validated scales measuring homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, as well as the biopsychosocial consequences derived from these attitudes in sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations. The search was conducted in the WOS, Scopus, and Medline databases, limited to studies published between January 2015 and January 2024. This review was registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews, and its quality was evaluated using the Effective Public Health Practice Project instrument. The criteria of the PRISMA declaration for systematic reviews were applied. Among the 78 articles initially selected, 9 met the established eligibility criteria. In these 9 articles, 13 validated scales were identified, covering attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities, internalised stigma, minority stress and resilience, parental acceptance, and experiences of bullying and cyberbullying in SGM populations. The findings reveal substantial fragmentation in the available measurement landscape, with most instruments lacking cross-cultural validation, measurement invariance testing, and construct coverage beyond Western, English- or Spanish-speaking contexts. These results should be interpreted with caution given the limited number of included studies and the absence of meta-analytic quantification. This review proposes the development of a novel intermodular measurement system as a priority research agenda and identifies key implications for specialized psychiatric and clinical practice, public health surveillance, and future research. Full article

Serious leisure theory proposes that deep engagement in leisure activities yields personal and social benefits, yet its application to adolescent risk behavior remains unexplored. This cross-sectional study examined whether specific qualities of serious leisure (effort/perseverance, talents/skills, self-expression, activity outcomes, financial benefit, and ethos) predicted four risk behavior domains (delinquency, cyberbullying, eating disorders, sexual risk) among 1141 Croatian adolescents (64.8% female; 60.0% younger cohort aged 14–17, 40.0% older cohort aged 18–20). Serious leisure qualities were assessed with subscales adapted from the Serious Leisure Inventory and Measure (SLIM) and risk behaviors with validated self-report instruments, both administered through an anonymous online questionnaire. Hierarchical regression models revealed that serious leisure qualities explained 5–11% of variance in risk behaviors beyond demographics, with significant age-moderation effects. For younger adolescents, effort and perseverance in leisure activities served as the primary protective factor (r = −0.14 to −0.17), whereas for older adolescents, perceived activity outcomes (satisfaction and personal growth) emerged as the dominant protector (r = −0.12 to −0.21). Conversely, financial benefit derived from leisure consistently predicted higher risk across all domains, particularly cyberbullying (r = 0.35 among younger participants). A significant developmental shift in leisure preferences was observed, with structured activities declining from 27.6% to 18.6% as participants aged (χ² = 36.91, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that the subjective quality of leisure engagement, rather than the type of activity alone, shapes risk trajectories, with distinct protective mechanisms operating at different developmental stages. Implications for age-tailored leisure-based prevention programs are discussed. Full article

Despite growing concern about cyberbullying as a contributor to the adolescent mental health crisis, its position within the broader network of co-occurring risks remains theoretically unresolved. Guided by the Three-Step Theory of suicide, the current study conceptualized cyberbullying as a distal contextual risk that influences suicidality indirectly through hopelessness. An Ising model network was estimated in a nationally representative sample of 9621 U.S. high school students from the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, including cyberbullying victimization and 13 other risk behaviors. The results showed that hopelessness was the most central node (Strength z = 1.89) and the strongest bridge (Bridge Strength z = 2.35), linking mental health to other domains. The shortest path from cyberbullying to suicide attempts was direct (path length = 2.37), though the indirect pathway through hopelessness and suicidal ideation was marginally longer (2.48), and removing hopelessness reduced cyberbullying’s bridge strength from 3.00 to 2.39 (Δ = −0.61). Network comparison tests revealed no significant sex differences in global strength or structure, and bootstrap analyses confirmed excellent stability. These findings position hopelessness as a central bridging node in the adolescent risk network. Full article

This study examined Saudi adolescents’ digital use, experiences of cyberbullying, and willingness to seek help when facing online risks. Furthermore, the study examined how perceived online safety, preferred reporting sources, exposure to online safety education, and demographic characteristics are associated with resistance to help-seeking. A cross-sectional online survey was completed by 302 adolescents aged 11–17 years across Saudi Arabia. Descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVAs, and hierarchical multiple regression were used to explore patterns and predictors of resistance to help-seeking. Descriptively, the results showed near-universal smartphone access, high daily screen time, and that a substantial minority had experienced recent cyberbullying, including repeated victimization. Although most participants reported feeling safe online, many expressed uncertainty and endorsed self-reliant or avoidant responses, with over half agreeing they would “just ignore” cyberbullying. Parents were the most frequently identified reporting source, yet around one-fifth of adolescents said that they would not seek help from anyone. Regression analyses indicated that female gender, higher socioeconomic status, feeling less safe online, and receiving online safety education from multiple sources were associated with lower resistance to help-seeking, whereas greater cyberbullying exposure predicted higher resistance. Overall, the results highlight the need for multi-source, culturally grounded online safety education and strengthened reporting pathways across families, schools, and digital platforms to support Saudi adolescents who experience cyberbullying and related online harms. Full article

Digital isolation represents a contemporary paradox in which increased connectivity through social media and digital technologies does not necessarily translate into improved social integration or psychological well-being. This review synthesizes current evidence on the relationship between digital environments and mental health, with a focus on mechanisms underlying loneliness, anxiety, depression, and related outcomes. The findings indicate that problematic and passive use of social media—particularly when associated with social comparison processes and Fear of Missing Out (FoMO)—is consistently linked to increased levels of depressive symptoms, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and reduced well-being. At the same time, the evidence highlights substantial heterogeneity, suggesting that the impact of digital technologies is moderated by user characteristics, age, patterns of engagement, and psychosocial context. Importantly, digital technologies may also serve compensatory and protective functions by facilitating social support, especially in conditions of objective isolation. Key mediating mechanisms include cyberbullying, social exclusion, emotional contagion, and internalization of body image standards. The concept of “digital loneliness” emerges as a useful framework for understanding the discrepancy between constant connectivity and perceived relational insufficiency. Practical implications emphasize the need for targeted interventions focusing on digital literacy, healthy usage patterns, and psychosocial support rather than simplistic reduction in screen time. Overall, digital isolation should be conceptualized as a qualitative dysfunction of mediated social interaction rather than a purely quantitative effect of technology exposure. Full article

Student-initiated bullying against teachers has become an increasingly visible yet understudied issue in educational research, particularly in regions like Lebanon, where such dynamics remain largely unspoken. This mixed-methods pilot study explored the experiences of 53 educators working in Lebanese private schools, combining survey responses with in-depth interviews from a purposive subsample of 11 teachers across elementary, middle, and high school levels. Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and the Power Relations in Education framework, the study examined how intersecting layers of influence, from classroom interactions to institutional cultures and broader societal norms, and patterns of student-to-teacher aggression. The findings revealed frequent occurrences of verbal defiance, emotional manipulation, and cyberbullying. Many teachers reported feeling unsupported by school administrations and constrained by cultural attitudes that silenced discussions about teacher vulnerability. Educators described emotional exhaustion, professional frustration, and a growing sense of disempowerment in the face of persistent aggression. Their voices underscored the pressing need for structural reforms, including clear policies, sustained training, and a cultural shift that reinforces respect for educators. This research contributes to a broader understanding of the emotional and professional impact of student bullying on teachers and highlights the need for inclusive, context-sensitive strategies that prioritize educator well-being and authority in the school environment. Full article

Chinese social media cyberbullying detection faces three major challenges: implicit aggressive semantics, diverse adversarial expression patterns, and severe long-tailed class imbalance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Multi-Committee Ensemble (HMCE) framework for Chinese cyberbullying detection. At the representation level, a hybrid architecture integrating pre-trained language models, multi-scale TextCNN, and attention pooling is designed to capture both global contextual dependencies and fine-grained local N-gram offensive cues. At the decision level, a three-tier progressive ensemble architecture is constructed. Specifically, the Tier-0 Committee Ensemble Layer introduces heterogeneous committees with differentiated training strategies to generate diverse Out-of-Fold (OOF) probability features. The Tier-1 Aggregation Layer employs an XGBoost-based meta-learner to model nonlinear complementary relationships among committees and improve decision fusion capability. Furthermore, the Tier-2 Calibration Layer incorporates probability calibration and adaptive threshold optimization to alleviate prediction bias under long-tailed distributions and improve minority-class recognition performance. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset containing 23,080 Chinese social media posts demonstrate that the proposed HMCE framework achieves a Macro-F1 score of 90.26% and an accuracy of 92.50%, outperforming conventional pre-trained language models and existing ensemble approaches. The results validate the effectiveness, robustness, and generalization performance of HMCE for cyberbullying detection in complex Chinese linguistic environments. Full article

Cyberbullying victimization is a public health concern associated with adolescents’ psychological distress symptoms. This cross-sectional study examined whether relative deprivation and moral disengagement were statistically associated with the relationship between cyberbullying victimization and psychological distress symptoms among victim-only five-year higher vocational college students. Among 4290 valid respondents, 1419 students reported at least one cyberbullying victimization experience. Because the present study focused on victimization without concurrent perpetration, 1107 victim-only students were included in the primary analysis. Participants completed self-report measures of cyberbullying victimization, relative deprivation, moral disengagement, and psychological distress symptoms. After controlling for gender and age, cyberbullying victimization was positively associated with psychological distress symptoms. The bootstrap results indicated significant indirect associations through relative deprivation, through moral disengagement, and through the serial pathway from relative deprivation to moral disengagement. These findings suggest that relative deprivation and moral disengagement are statistically linked to the association between cyberbullying victimization and psychological distress symptoms among victim-only vocational students. Given the cross-sectional self-report design, the mediation findings should be interpreted as evidence of statistical associations rather than temporal ordering or causal mechanisms. Full article

Comprehensive school behavioral health (SBH) programs offer an integrated approach for mental health support. However, program success hinges on critical school-level factors, particularly school climate. While prior research has examined the discrepancy between student and teacher perceptions of school climate, there is uncertainty surrounding how correspondence of school climate perceptions may inform SBH implementation and continuous improvement. This exploratory study investigates student and teacher perceptions of school climate across 19 schools implementing a comprehensive SBH program within a large-scale randomized controlled trial. School climate data were collected during spring 2022 using the U.S. Department of Education School Climate Survey, which assesses school climate domains of engagement, safety, and environment. Pearson correlations and Cohen’s d were conducted using aggregate school-level student and teacher reports to examine correlation and mean-level differences across domains. Results revealed significant, moderate to high correspondence between student and teacher perceptions in domains of safety and environment, particularly across subdomains of physical safety, bullying/cyberbullying, substance abuse, mental health, and discipline. Findings indicate how correspondence in areas of school climate, such as safety and environment, may inform the implementation and improvement of school-wide SBH programming. Full article

In recent years, cyberspace governance has become a critical component of national security strategies worldwide. Although social network platforms provide users with convenient channels for expression and information acquisition, unregulated, harmful euphemisms have become increasingly prevalent. These euphemisms disrupt the order of the digital space and trigger secondary harms such as cyberbullying and regional discrimination. Currently, researches on Chinese harmful euphemism detection face three key challenges: the lack of large-scale annotated datasets, the cognitive reasoning deficit in lightweight models, and the latency constraints of Large Language Models (LLMs), which collectively constrain detection performance and real-world generalization. To address these issues, this study first collected a large corpus from social networking platforms and constructed a fine-grained annotated harmful euphemism dataset. Then, a representation learning framework was designed by integrating deep prompt-based chain-of-thought reasoning with multi-head contrastive learning. This framework introduces external knowledge from LLMs to enhance the diversity and precision of semantic representations. Finally, a multi-dimensional semantic perception fusion framework was proposed. It incorporates multiple semantic perception channels and a cross-channel dynamic fusion mechanism, enabling the model to better capture implicit semantics and integrate external contextual knowledge. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight models. While large-scale LLMs exhibit superior zero-shot transferability in cross-domain tasks, our proposed model maintains highly competitive performance with substantially lower inference latency and computational overhead. This research provides a novel methodological and technical foundation for detecting harmful euphemisms in social networks. Full article

Recent reports indicate that employees are being subjected to harassment on social media. However, research in this area is highly interdisciplinary, often existing in disciplines that cater to occupational groups, such as politicians, journalists, or education professionals. We therefore conducted a scoping review to synthesize research in this area. Our scoping review sought to identify (1) the nature of social media harassment towards employees, (2) specific risk factors, and (3) how organizations manage the problem. We conducted searches of the Web of Science and Scopus databases, alongside keyword searches of Google Scholar. Our approach aligned with PRISMA recommendations for conducting scoping reviews, and the searches produced 47 studies, of which 35 met the inclusion criteria. Analyses revealed the varied nature of social media harassment towards employees, reflected in the use of 14 different labels to describe social media harassment. Only five studies addressed risk factors for experiencing harassment, which included greater prominence and visibility, more active use of social media, and working in an organization where offline harassment occurs. Moreover, just six studies have examined organizational responses to the problem, and were largely seen as ineffective, although thirteen studies addressed how individuals coped with social media harassment. This is the first paper that reviews research on social media harassment directed at employees. To consolidate this research area, we offer suggestions aimed at reducing construct proliferation and promoting a more coherent research agenda. Full article

The representation of the sexuality of people with disabilities in contemporary media is often characterized by stereotypes, omissions, and heteronormative narratives that deny the complexity and richness of their emotional experiences. This essay explores the potential of photovoice-based methodology as a tool of visual empowerment to foster processes of authentic and self-aware self-representation through the immersive dynamic that this methodology can activate. Through an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that combines special pedagogy with recent research on digital media and immersive technologies, the study seeks to understand whether virtual spaces can be configured as protected environments in which people with disabilities have the opportunity to explore and communicate their sexual identity. Photovoice thus becomes a tool of narrative resistance that overcomes barriers and counters mediatized representations, often conveyed through dynamics of ableist cyberbullying and online discrimination. The contribution highlights how the combination of participatory visual storytelling and immersive environments can generate new forms of inclusive media literacy, promoting a Visual Education that recognizes and values the diversity of human experiences. Particular attention is devoted to the educational potential of these tools in the training of educators and social workers, as well as in raising awareness within the broader community. The paper proposes a theoretical and methodological framework for the implementation of visual self-representation projects capable of transforming social perceptions of disability and promoting a culture of authentic and respectful inclusion. Full article

The rapid proliferation of digital technologies has transformed the landscape of gender-based violence globally. This quantitative study used an online survey to explore the experiences of women with disabilities in relation to technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) in South Africa. Findings from 204 participants highlight patterns across age, province, education, employment, income, disability type, and forms of TFGBV experienced, and how TFGBV may differ at intersections of these factors. They show that cyberbullying, hacking, and hate speech were the most prevalent forms of TFGBV, disproportionately affecting women with various disabilities. The study further reveals how socio-economic disadvantage, manifested in limited access to secure technologies, digital literacy, and support systems, intensifies exposure to harm and constrains access to justice. The study calls for inclusive, power-conscious approaches to research, policy and interventions that centre lived experiences of women with disabilities. Addressing TFGBV in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), therefore, requires not only legal reform and digital safety initiatives but also broader strategies for socio-economic empowerment and systemic transformation to end gendered–disability violence in both the material and virtual world. Full article