Deviance in the Digital Era: Cyberbullying

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the main scientific researches made on cyberbullying and cyberharassment. These attacks which take place in the digital world seem to increase every year with the advances of technologies. They correspond to the repetitive attack of someone by another individual or a group, through the digital devices, with the purpose of causing humiliation and embarrassment. The effect online bullying has on a victim’s life is profound and can even lead, in certain cases, to suicide. We observe that, in history, this kind of attack has been systematically considered as an extension of bullying experienced in school by children. That explains why it has been treated essentially as a problem related to and afflicting “youth”. Moreover, we argue that some new kind of online attack should also be added to the existent literature and considered as humiliation. These attacks, such as happy slapping, even if not repetitive, have still an impact on the victim’s reputation and cause an extreme psychological distress. Here, our aim is to propose another conceptualization of the terms used in the literature and to point out that everybody in the society, whatever the age, can be a victim of these digital attacks. We believe that this approach will contribute to the improvement of the awareness campaigns.

Keywords

Sociology; Cyberbullying, Cyberharassment, Humiliation, Internet, Technologies.