Students' experiences of online peer violence during distance education

The topic of my seminar paper is cyberbullying or online bullying, especially during the COVID -19 pandemic when pupils and students were educated from home. The theoretical part presents and describes the bullying itself, particularly peer bullying. Secondly, the typical features of bullying are pointed out and results of different studies already made on the topic are presented. The main issue of my paper is online bullying. I try to define it and to present the differences between the online and the traditional bullying. To do this I used the results of the studies made so far as well. In the empirical part the results of the questionnaire conducted among teenagers from the 6th to the 9th grade in 10 different schools around Slovenia are explained. The questionnaire was set to point out changes or increase of cyberbullying before and during the distance education. The results reveal that the most common form of online bullying were messages with inappropriate contents. They also show a significant increase of cyberbullying during the distance schooling compared to the time before it. On the other hand, it is evident from the questionnaire that the amount of bullying among pupils from the 6th to the 9th grade has not changed much referring to the time before or during the distance education, but it shows that the more time pupils spend on the internet the more they face online bullying. It is also important that students who experienced more traditional peer bullying at school were also faced with more bullying online during the distance education. My research focuses on perception of bullying that is why it cannot be proven that online bullying has increased during the distance schooling. The results of the questionnaire were not surprising. But the answers revealed that girls rather than boys, as well as older students, are more often victims of bullying. Younger pupils would face traditional bullying more often in contrary to older ones that are more often faced with online bullying. It is surprising that many pupils have already been a victim to traditional bullying, whereas less pupils report about online bullying. The topic of my paper is undoubtedly an important issue and worth further studying, despite some advantages and disadvantages that have occurred during my research work