Intimidation has change a lot since the beginning of the confinement

In March 2020 the schools closed because of covid-19.

About 2-3 months later the students started to do online classes and intimidation started to lower.

According to researchers from Ontario who surveyed over 6,500 Ontarians, the percentage of young people being intimidated has decreased by 20% and the percentage of people bullying has reduced by 12%.

All this because the students were no longer going to schools and were doing online classes. The ones that were still going had less classmates because the groups were smaller and they had less occasion to socialize. The situation is similar in 

A psychology teacher, Miss Tracy Vaillancourt noticed that the health crisis has had a better impact on intimidation than all the efforts of reduction of violence at school. “Something striking happened and we need to find out what it is”, she said.

Tracy Vaillancourt also said that according to her, the most important factor was that the teacher supervised students more. “If we have more supervision of children, they will be less likely to have relationship problems with their peers,” she said, specifying however that the solution was not to add surveillance cameras or the presence of police officers, but to have staff members that have direct interactions with young people.

However, cyber bullying got worse! A 26% increase in requests related to cyber-harassment was observed compared to September 2019. It was observed more with the teenagers that have access to media like Instagram or Tiktok. 

A young boy turning 12 years old got intimidated by his classmates during an online class and the teacher said, “I had the impression of having in front of me animals that were no longer thinking”.

It is even worse in high school. The high school students take pictures of their classmates and teachers without their permission. They make jokes and interrupt the teachers.

Now the question is, what is going to happen now that most of the kids are going back to school?