Teachers’ knowledge and intervention strategies to handle hate-postings

ABSTRACT

Hate-postings are an example of cyberhate that can happen among students in a school. However, no study to date has ever investigated this phenomenon from the perspectives of teachers and almost nothing is known about it in the school setting. Teachers (N= 130, 83% female) reported their knowledge, attitudes, and likely responses to a hypothetical hate-posting incident in which a student was devaluated, insulted and verbally harassed online because of his country of origin and religious affiliation, in addition to giving information about several school level variables. Based on answers to the 22 items of the newly developed handling hate-posting questionnaire (HHPQ), six teacher responses were identified with exploratory factor analysis. Teachers would most often alert other colleagues, followed by using victim-oriented rehabilitating strategies , working with the perpetrators’ parents, applying authority-based sanctions, seeking help from external professionals, and they would rather not ignore the incident. Different individual and school level variables predicted these responses. Teachers who had higher levels of moral disengagement and who reported that there were no school-wide guidelines were more likely to ignore the incident. Implications for the prevention of cyberhate are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberhate
• teacher responses
• stigma-based bullying
• bias-based bullying

Author Note

Dagmar Strohmeier, School of Medical Engineering and Applied Social Sciences, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Linz, Austria. email: [email protected]

Petra Gradinger, School of Medical Engineering and Applied Social Sciences, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Linz, Austria. email: [email protected]

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Rainer Schmidbauer and the students of the master program “Addiction and violence prevention in educational settings” (University of Education Upper Austria, Linz) for their invaluable support in realizing this study. We are also very grateful to the schools and teachers who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.