Cyberbullying and Online Harms
Helen Cowie, Carrie‐Anne Myers · 2023
Tackling violence, harassment and hate crime is high on the agenda for UK universities. Since 2010 the National Union of Students has conducted surveys that evidence problematic behaviours within university settings, including sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances amongst the student population (NUS, 2010; NUS, 2014). Further research also provides evidence of staff sexual misconduct and predatory behaviours (NUS 2018), as well as racial and homophobic harassment, prejudice and (cyber)-bullying (Wertans & Chakraborti 2020; EHRC 2019; Formby 2017; Myers & Cowie 2017). For this chapter, we report findings from the Violence at University Project (Myers et al., 2022), a quantitative pilot research project that ran from November 2020 until December 2021. The survey was designed by City, University of London, in collaboration with Universities UK (UUK), University of Surrey, De Montfort University and the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). It was a feasibility study to investigate the possibility of measuring violence, in all its forms, within the HE sector and was not a prevalence study. It did not ask for rates or frequency of violence, it was designed to ascertain whether it would be possible to measure violence in all its forms, picking up both subtle and unsubtle events.