Cyberbullying on Social Media: an Analysis of Teachers' Unheard Voices and Coping Strategies in Nepal.

Abstract

Teachers can be potential victims of cyberbullying, particularly targeted by their students at their workplaces. The growing use of social media has been observed promoting cyberbullying in addition to face-to-face bullying. Often neglected by academic organisations and policymakers, cyberbullying has become one of the biggest challenges for teachers to manage normal teaching and learning. This article reports an examination of teachers' experiences of how they were cyberbullied by students particularly on social media and their coping mechanisms. This qualitative study utilised online semi-structured interviews with twenty teachers and observation of their Facebook account to explore their familiarities with the digital era agitations. Findings indicate how teachers on social media become victims of trivial belittling, unethical requests, uninvited sexual advances made by students and colleagues, insolence, sabotaging of shared contents and trolling of manipulative contents. While this article explored individual coping strategies of sharing, ignoring and enhancing self-efficacy to handle technology strongly and confidently, it concludes with the implications of collaborative coordination necessary for the development of strong policies and strict cyber laws for ensuring teachers' cybersecurity in similar contexts.