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This study examined factors that increase or decrease the support a bystander offered to a victim of cyberbullying. Possible determinants of supportive behaviour were analyzed using a four‐step hierarchical regression analysis on data from 156 Czech children (12–18 years old; M = 15.1; 54% females) who witnessed their schoolmates being victims of cyberbullying. Among individual characteristics, only a general tendency toward prosocial behaviour was a positive predictor of supportive behaviour. Other factors such as age, gender, self‐esteem, and problematic relationships with peers had no effect. Among contextual factors, existing relationships with the victim, upset feelings evoked by witnessing victimization, and direct requests for help from the victim triggered supportive behaviour, while strong relationships with the bully inhibited it. Fear of intervening played no role. The practical implications of the findings are discussed with regard to the roles of the emotional response of the bystander and direct requests for help from the victim in cyberbullying interventions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Although cyberbullying is a well-studied online risk, little is known about the effectiveness of various coping strategies for its victims. Therefore, this study on 2,092 Czech children aged 12-18 examined which coping strategies were applied most often and to what extent victims of cyber aggression judged them to be effective. Effectiveness was measured in two ways: the extent to which the coping strategy buffered negative emotions, and the extent to which it stopped the cyber aggression. The subsample of 422 respondents (68% girls) who experienced online attacks was divided into two groups: victims of cyberbullying, who experienced long-term and severe victimization, and victims of less severe online harassment. The selection of strategies was compared between these groups and the most prevalent and effective strategies were identified. Overall, respondents in both groups used more than one strategy at once, but for victims of cyberbullying, most of the strategies proved less effective. Both groups showed similar patterns in their use of technical solutions, and both quite frequently sought social support. Also, both groups showed a low tendency for retaliation. Large differences were found in how respondents employed cognitive responses, such as trying to detach mentally from bullying incidents; these strategies were less frequent among victims of cyberbullying. In terms of effectiveness, victims of harassment considered technical solutions such as blocking contacts on social websites, seeking support, or ignoring the bully on purpose the most effective in stopping victimization, as opposed to victims of cyberbullying, who found them less effective, even though they used them as frequently as victims of online harassment. Differences in the effectiveness of coping strategies are discussed with regard to the intervention and prevention of cyberbullying.

This study examined the bystander effect in cyberbullying. Using self-reported data from 257 Czech respondents who had witnessed a cyberbullying attack, we tested whether provided help decreased with increased number of other bystanders. We controlled for several individual and contextual factors, including empathy, social self-efficacy, empathic response to victimization, and relationship to the victim. Results showed that participants tend to help the victims more in incidents with only one or two other bystanders. We also found that, as in the "offline" realm, bystander effect is not linear: no significant differences were found between incidents with a moderate number (3-10) and a larger number of total bystanders. Our findings, thus, provide support for the presence of the bystander effect in cyberbullying.

Although the research on cyberbullying has increased dramatically in recent years, still little is known about how cyberbullying participant groups (i.e., cyberbullies, cybervictims, and cyberbully-victims) differ from one another. This study aims to discriminate between these groups at an individual and relational level by controlling for age and gender. Self-control, offline aggression, and self-esteem are analyzed as individual-level variables. Parental attachment and peer rejection are involved as relational-level variables. A total of 2,092 Czech adolescents aged 12 to 18 were enrolled from a random sample of 34 primary and secondary schools located in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic. Discriminant function analyses indicated that the participant groups are discriminated by two functions. The first function increases the separation between cyberbullies and cyberbully-victims from cybervictims, indicating that cyberbullies and cyberbully-victims are similar to each other in terms of low self-control, offline aggression, and gender, and have higher scores on measures of low self-esteem and offline aggression. However, cyberbully-victims had the highest scores on these measures. The second function discriminates between all three groups, which indicates that those variables included in the second function (i.e., parental attachment, peer rejection, self-esteem, and age) distinguish all three involved groups.