”Do I really need to help?!” Perceived severity of cyberbullying, victim blaming, and bystanders’ willingness to help the victim

Abstract

Whether bystanders in cyberbullying help a victim or remain passive is based on multilayered cognitive processes. In particular, perceiving and interpreting an incident as an emergency situation, realizing one’s own responsibility to intervene, and forming the intention to help are crucial preconditions for bystander interventions. The characteristics of information and communication technologies (ICTs) change and hamper these cognitive processes. Information and cues that guide individuals’ reactions to offline victimization are missing in many online environments (e.g., seeing a victim’s suffering). By applying a scenario-based experiment (n = 240; 62% female; Mage = 21.3), we investigate how cyberbullying incidents with differing degrees of severity (insults only vs. insults and threats) affect bystanders’ perception of the incident, their tendency to blame the victim, and finally their reactions to cyber victimization (i.e., willingness to help). Our results showed that participants evaluated an incident that included threats and insults (as compared to insults only) as more severe; this in turn was related to a higher willingness to help the victim. In contrast, a seemingly less severe incident (containing insults only) fostered participants’ tendency to ascribe (at least partial) blame for the incident to the victim. This victim blaming correlated with a lower tendency to support the victim. In conclusion, victims of seemingly less serious incidents in particular are at risk of experiencing prolonged suffering because bystanders fail to identify the emergency character of the situation and refuse to help.

Awareness, Policy, Privacy, and More: Post-Secondary Students Voice Their Solutions to Cyberbullying

“…There was some victim-blaming in the responses, see also [62,63], with some students, particularly survey respondents, saying that people too often left themselves vulnerable to being cyberbullied and therefore should not be surprised if they suffered the consequences.…”

Does sexual orientation of bullying target influence bystander response?

“…Bystanders to emergencies, crises, and abuse may respond in ways that escalate or halt the situation. While bystander responses to crises and emergencies have been studied in violence/sexual assault (Chabot et al, 2018;Lukacena et al, 2019), medical emergency (Fischer et al, 2011), cyberbullying (Koehler and Weber, 2018), and school bullying settings (Jenkins and Nickerson, 2019), there is far less in the workplace bullying context (Mulder et al, 2016;Paull et al, 2012), especially related to target sexual orientation as an antecedant.…”

“…Myriad factors have been shown to influence the bystander's propensity to act -gender (Poteat and Vecho, 2016), relationship/friendship with the target (Coyne et al, 2019;Ryan and Wessel, 2012;D'Cruz and Noranda, 2010), perceived severity of the incident (Koehler and Weber, 2018), attributed target responsibility (Mulder et al, 2014), empathy (Nickerson et al, 2014) and accomplices (Namie and Lutgen-Sandvik, 2010). Bystander responses to emergency situations are complex and involve cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components (Koehler and Weber, 2018). Additionally, the context of the situation may also play a part in influencing bystander perceptions and decisions.…”

Miedo y tristeza en adolescentes espectadores de cyberbullying. Vulneración de la salud mental en la era digital

“…Los espectadores, usualmente, no asumen la responsabilidad de intervenir si entienden que hay otras personas que podrían hacerlo; por tanto, la responsabilidad de ayudar se desplaza hacia el grupo, a otra persona, a los amigos de la víctima o a los adultos (Boyd, 2014;DeSmet et al, 2012;DeSmet et al, 2016;Macháčková et al, 2013). Koehler & Weber (2018) señalan que los espectadores de cyberbullying evalúan como más severas las agresiones que incluyen amenazas, en comparación con aquellas en las que solo se presentan insultos. Asimismo, los espectadores que anteriormente estuvieron involucrados en situaciones de cyberbullying, sea en calidad de víctimas o agresores, suelen tener mayor inclinación a auxiliar a las víctimas (Leung et al, 2018).…”