School-based cyberbullying: socio-psychological aspect

Abstract

The socio-psychological factors of how cyberbullying manifests among students are covered in this article. In modern conditions, the process of socialization of adolescents is rapidly moving to the Internet, where “virtual communication” arises, which has become for many an additional resource in communication, mastering various social roles and norms of behavior and opening up new social opportunities. Unlike adults, teenagers become an addition to live communication skills, skills related to communication through emails, messages,and they master all these skills at the same time. At the same time, the development and availability of infocommunication technologies has led to the emergence of completely new way of aggression, named cyberbullying, which is a socio-psychological problem and needs to find methods to solve it. Cyberbullying should be understood as deliberate aggressive actions directed against the victim, which are carried out systematically over a certain period of time using various electronic forms of interaction, from playful-comic to psychological virtual terror, the result of which may be suicide. Teenagers are the most vulnerable group for cyberbullying, since their uncontrolled communication on the Internet entails communication risks in the form of illegal contacts, cybercrime, cyberbullying, etc. The conducted theoretical analysis allows us to determine the causes of cyberbullying and factors that increase the risk of this phenomenon, including external behavioral and internal manifestations of schoolchildren, thoughts and judgments about themselves and others, social skills, personality traits, features of social contacts, perception of the school climate. Based on the materials of native and foreign studies, the results of the influence of cyberbullying on the social life and psychoemotional state of adolescents are presented. The analysis of scientific research on this topic is presented; the issues of strengthening the psychological health of schoolchildren as a factor in the prevention of cyberbullying are touched upon. According to the authors, in order to solve this problem, it is necessary to strengthen the psychological health of schoolchildren, increase the level of digital literacy and the culture of behavior of Internet users since childhood.