UC EVENTS

Abstract - Like other countries throughout the Anglophone West, the problem of cyberbullying has become something of a national obsession—even a media panic—in Australia. The mass media has framed the issue as a crisis and an epidemic threatening the wellbeing of Australian youth, provoking a comprehensive policy and legislative response to the problem. This article draws on qualitative interviews and focus groups with forty Australian parents to determine parents’ own anxieties, perspectives, and experiences in relation to cyberbullying. This study found that while online conflict, exclusion and relational aggression appear common amongst young people, participants eschewed the term cyberbullying and were resistant to what they considered to be overly sensationalised media coverage of the issue. Parents in this study, while noting that cyberbullying differed from non-mediated, offline bullying in some ways, suggested that cyberbullying was not a new, urgent problem, but instead, an extension of an issue that young people had been navigating for decades. Thus, parents considered it to be part of ‘normal’ child development. This paper concludes by arguing that a more nuanced understanding of negative online behaviours is needed.