In my degree I am focusing on the needs and knowledge/experiences of advisory service in primary schools when they are faced with cyberbullying. The main reason I decided to research his topic is, that I could not find any studies done from this perspective yet.
Therefore, my focus is not on how common cyberbullying is, but on how well advisory workers know cyberbullying, and how they handle the situations when it happens. One other very important point of my research is finding out what do the social workers need in order to be able to solve this kind of problems in a better way.
In the theoretical part, I first explain what violence is in general, afterwards I explained gender specific violence and then separately explain bullying and cyberbullying. I continue with pointing out similarities and differences between the two types. In the last lines of theoretical part, I furthermore explain the role and tasks that form the original purpose of advisory service.
The empirical part presents the results of my research that are pointing towards the self-initiative of advisory workers I spoke with. The research showed that they are getting most of their knowledge from the internet itself e.g. from sites designed to educate and help in cases of cyberbullying / articles of the same subject. They also get a lot of new knowledge from the cases they work on.
I have interviewed 5 advisory workers. The number is somewhat low due to timing of the research (May, June, July 2019). The numbers are also low due to all the work advisory workers must do, so a lot of them could not make the time to hear me out.
The advisory workers I did have the chance to talk to, have been in touch with cyberbullying before, and they were all seeking some help from the police in the more complicated cases. They said that in fact only one amongst them got help.
The help from police did not manage to reach them, mainly because legislation, regarding the cyberbullying is very vague and gives the police almost no power to act towards it. All the social workers mentioned above, have expressed the need for more support when dealing with cyberbullying. They also said that more connections from the outside world would be very useful.
To list some of the outer connections that might have been useful - societies working with cyberbullying, the police etc. The need of constant education is ever-growing in their opinion, since cyberbullying is adapting to the new technologies. Mutual help among colleagues in primary schools e.g. teachers, parents etc. to social workers would do a major difference as well, they say.
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