Cyberbullying 101: A Student Affairs Perspective

Bullying and its negative effects within the K-12 educational sector are thoroughly researched problems. However, there is a relative lack of research on bullying and its most recent incarnation, cyberbullying, within United States higher education. The studies that do exist indicate that college-level cyberbullying is a problem on some U.S. campuses. The goal of my study was to explore the experiences of student affairs administrators in implementing policies and practices used to address cyberbullying. I conducted a qualitative study at three research universities which consisted of document review of publications related to online harassment at each school as well as in-depth interviews with 35 university administrators who implement cyberbullying policy and practice in their work.Based on my study, cyberbullying may be defined as digital interactions that the originator intends to emotionally and/or psychologically harm the recipient and/or that the recipient perceives as emotionally and/or psychologically harmful. Further, a hierarchy for cyberbullying incidents based on my study ranges in severity from "Formerly In-Person" incidents to "Cyber-Stalking" incidents. My study also found that student affairs administrators relied on collaboration with colleagues and on university-wide policies in order to address cyberbullying incidents. Finally, my study found that the unique possibilities that online technology provides, including anonymity for perpetrators, wide-spread and instant dissemination of negative actions, a minimization of and desensitization to online interactions, the uncertainty of "jurisdiction" for policing the Internet, and the at times impossibility to trace acts of cyberbullying presented challenges to student affairs administrators in addressing the phenomenon