With schools forced to implement alternative education modalities such as online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, incidences of cyberbullying are expected to soar even higher in the coming months.
To help parents as well as education practitioners learn how both online and offline communities can protect children and youth from cyberbullying, a panel of local and international experts shared suggestions on how to prevent this phenomenon.
Experts from the Philippines and South Korea exchanged views on cyberbullying and how this can be prevented especially with the rising cases among youth in a webinar on cyberbullying organized by Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation recently.
During the webinar, 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee and Blue Tree Foundation (BTF) founder Kim Jong-ki shared how he and his foundation has been battling school violence in the past 20 years.
The BTF was very instrumental in curbing incidences of violence against students in schools.
BTF Preventive Education Center Head Park Ju-han shared that in South Korea, school violence has declined for 15 years but has risen again since 2015.
“The main factors are the low aging and the increase of cyberbullying,” he said.
Meanwhile, BTF Research and Counseling Team Leader Lee Sun-young discussed how the foundation has been working with schools on the prevention of violence among students and shared some best practices that can be adopted by other countries like the Philippines.
“We need to teach children when to respond when cyberbullying is happening,” she said.
“Digital literacy is the first key on how to be nice in the world,” she added.
In the Philippines, UP Manila-Philippine General Hospital Child Protection Unit (CPU) head Dr. Bernadette Madrid noted that “bullying has been increasing.”
Based on the results of the national baseline survey on violence against children in 2016, she shared that “bullying in the Philippines was quite high” with 65 percent of the youth - ages 13 to 17 years old - have experienced some form of bullying.
Same goes for the prevalence of cyberbullying wherein 44% of the students reported cyber violence.
“It is a real problem here in our country, it is harmful but it can be prevented,” Madrid said. Given this, she noted that in terms of prevention, a single program is not enough to address cyberbullying.
“We need multiple programs to be more successful,” she added.
Meanwhile, Don Bosco Technical College Cebu president and dean Fr. Fidel Orendain noted that protecting students from violence and abuse especially with the shift to e-learning is a challenge for many schools.
“This topic is a hot issue for us right now,” he admitted. Since schools are familiar with face-to-face familiarity, he noted that online learning is “challenging our identity and the way we educate.”
To resolve this, he urged schools to increase their presence by way of talks and conferences.
“We can also make ourselves available for counseling,” he added.
For Stairway Foundation, Inc. Senior Advocacy Officer Ysrael Diloy, protecting children at this time is more crucial than ever.
In the past 18 years, he has been working with key government agencies in the Philippines, via national level councils and working groups, advocating for child protection policy, and programmatic changes. “We are at an age wherein the current generation of children has known technology as the norm,” he said.
Diloy has initiated the CyberSafe program which is currently the flagship child online protection program of the Department of Education (DepEd).
“Now more than ever, we need to ensure that we are all contributing to make the Internet a safe space for and with children, so that they can reap all the benefits and opportunities that technology presents - this is the very essence the CyberSafe program hopes to achieve,” he ended.