Exploration of cyberbullying behaviour among students of secondary schools in Dhaka during COVID-19

Abstract

Cyberbullying is attracting widespread attentions of academic interests globally as an emerging issue. A challenging aspect to understand this phenomenon in Bangladeshi context is inexistence of enough literature despite the global prevalence and local tension around the topic due to development of online class during covid-19. This study aims to seek the prevalence of cyberbullying and its relationship to the time spent online among secondary grade school going children in Dhaka in light of covid-19 period. Besides, it intended to understand the influencing capacities of power-driven social group-based hierarchy on cyberbullying and how society as a whole is sustaining an institutional discriminatory environment providing hegemonic control through cyberbullying. A mixed method research approach has been adopted to find the generalized answers while understanding the phenomenon closely based on the new theory. As far as the research is concerned, social dominance theory is being used for the first time in this context to understand cyberbullying as the result of a societal and structural discriminatory process nurtured through power based social hierarchies. The study finds strong prevalence of cyberbullying behaviour among the respondents comparable to the scenario of North American region. Moreover, there are significant relationship between time spent online and the cyberbullying experiences. It has also been originated that socially structured powerful groups dominate less powerful group through institutional discrimination where family, school and society have important role to sustain that discrimination resulting a hegemonic control. Thus, to establish the hegemonic control cyberbullying has been weaponized by the dominating groups by inflicting fear inside the victim’s mind. Hence, the author recommends a comprehensive structural ecological process to be considered to strategize and implemented to prevent cyberbullying to provide safe learning environment and virtual space to the children.