Cyber Bullying: A Critical Overview

A strong societal interest in the phenomenon of what has later been called bullying first started in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the designation "mobbing." At that time, there existed basically no empirical research data to shed light on the many issues and concerns involved in the general Swedish debate about the phenomenon. Against this background, I initiated, in the early 1970s, what is usually considered to be the first systematic research project on bullying by peers. This project was first published as a book in Swedish in 1973 (Olweus, 1973). In 1978, a somewhat expanded version of this book appeared in the United States under the title Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys (Olweus, 1978). In the context of the translation, I decided to replace the term "mobbing" with the term "bullying" (Olweus, 2013). And most of the international attention to these problems over the past 25 years or so concerns some variant of the term bullying and not mobbing (which term, however, has been retained in the Scandinavian countries).