Cyberbullying in adolescents and its increase due to new technologies

Abstract

Currently the whole world is living a pandemic product of the virus Covid-19, reason why different aspects of daily life were affected, one of them, the education, that changed from been face-to-face to being online taking with him problems from physical world, in this case “bullying”, to the digital world, leading to cyberbullying. In this social problem the most vulnerable are teenagers, who when are victimized by an aggressor, present negative consequences in various aspects of their lives, reason why the present investigation was carried out, which main objective is identify the consequences of cyberbullying in adolescents, in order to present possible solutions to this form of harassment, also know the percentage of cyberbullying victims within the analyzed population and if it is aware of it. The present research has a qualitative nature, and the data collection tool implemented was the survey of a sample of 186 students that belong to educational units in Quito - Ecuador. Through the surveys it was possible to register that 86% of the analyzed sample has knowledge about cyberbullying, the rest have a vague idea or do not know anything about it, it was also possible to recognize that 22.6% of the sample has suffered from cyberbullying, that despite being a low percentage indicates that there are existing cases and among other situations that could be corroborated with the data collection tool. Then, through the application of the survey and the support of a structured theoretical framework, it was concluded that the main consequences of cyberbullying are emotional (behavior), academic (performance in studies) and social (interpersonal relationships).