Dr. Tijana Milosevic:

As I mentioned earlier, we conducted a study with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. This study was also done in ten other European countries with children aged ten to 18. We conducted research into the children's use of digital media, the experience of risks and the exposure to different types on online harm, with cyberbullying being one of those. We have seen a 28% increase in cyberbullying victimisation during the lockdown. We asked children how much cyberbullying they had experienced and if they had experienced it less frequently, with about the same frequency or more frequently during the lockdown than before. That was our focus. We gave them a definition of cyberbullying. This was an increase when compared to previous studies in Ireland that have shown a cyberbullying victimisation rate of about 14% for primary school ages and just under 10% for post-primary school ages. There had been an increase, but as I hinted earlier, I would be careful because while it is an increase it is not as huge a spike as we might have expected based on the media reports we saw during the lockdown. I just have to be careful about that. When we break down the numbers across age groups and gender, one realises that the most frequent answer is "as frequently as before the lockdown". Only for some age groups do we see a large spike with regard to children saying "a lot more frequently during the lockdown than before".