Citation

Montiel I, Carbonell E, Pereda N. Child Abuse Negl. 2015; 52: 123-134.

Affiliation

Grup de Recerca en Victimització Infantil i Adolescent (GReVIA), Institut de Recerca en Cervell, Cognició i Conducta (IR3C), Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.12.005

PMID

26724825

Abstract

Little is known about online victimization of Spanish adolescents. The present study aims to determine the past-year prevalence of online victimization in a community sample of Spanish adolescents. The final sample consisted of 3,897 adolescents between 12 and 17 years old (M=14.45, SD=1.59), 1,836 males and 2,049 females, recruited from 39 secondary schools in the east of Spain. The Cuestionario de victimización juvenil mediante internet y/o teléfono móvil (hereinafter, Juvenile Online Victimization Questionnaire, JOV-Q, Montiel & Carbonell, 2012) was applied for the assessment of eight types of online victimization grouped in two major domains: sexual (sexual coercion, sexual pressure, online grooming by an adult, unwanted exposure to sexual content and violation of privacy); and nonsexual victimization (online harassment, happy slapping, pressure to obtain personal information). Sixty-one percent of adolescents reported online victimization during the last year. Online sexual victimization was reported by 39.5% of adolescents and nonsexual victimization by 53.4% of them, whereas 31% of youth reported having experienced online victimization in both domains. The highest prevalence rates were recorded for online harassment (50%), unwanted exposure to sexual content (24.4%), pressure to obtain personal information (18.4%) and online grooming by an adult (17.2%), and the lowest for sexual coercion (6.7%) and happy slapping (2.2%). Thirty-five percent of the adolescents were considered online polyvictims and most of them experienced victimization in both sexual and nonsexual domains (88%). This study illustrates that Spanish adolescents experience high levels of online victimization and that multiple online victimization appears to be the norm among cybervictims.

Language: en