Engl. transl.: THE ONLINE AND OFFLINE BULLYING: VICTIMS VERSUS AGGRESSORS

"In this paper I shall analyze – using data from the EU Kids Online II project – the spread and the impact of online and offline bullying among children and teenagers (9 to 16 year old). I will start with an overview of what cyber bullying and online bullying are in the context of, on one hand, the risks of the Internet and on the other, of the aggressive behavior in general, regardless its channel of manifestation. In the second half, I analyze the online bullying data for Romania. Upon the theoretical set from the first part, the goal of the empirical data analysis is to sketch of victims and aggressors in terms of age, gender and socioeconomic status, complemented with some psychological and behavioral features. Some of the key questions I sought an answer were: are the kids involved in such phenomena “prone” to a certain role (victim or aggressor) or the roles can be reversed? Is there a connection between their Internet user features (length of daily time online, variety of activities, level of digital literacy) and their involvement in bullying (online and offline) as victim and/or aggressor?"

“... as children get older, they are more likely to be a victim of all forms of bullying, but especially the face to face (offline) one. This result contradicts the older studies that found younger children to be more likely to be victims of bullying. (...) For Romanian children, being involved in online bullying correlates with the time spent online and with the number of activities. On the contrary, being a perpetrator in online bullying negatively correlates with the time spent online (r = −0,229, p < 0.05). (...) Most children (48%) are ‘a little’ upset after being a victim of online bullying” (Velicu, 2014; coder’s translation)