Online bullying shock result

In the first major report of its kind, an anti-bullying charity has discovered that more than half of young people have suffered abuse while playing games online.

Ditch the Label surveyed around 2,500 young members of the virtual hotel platform Habbo, aged between 12 and 25, over a period of four days about their experiences of being subjected to, witnessing and perpetrating bullying.

Liam Hackett, its founder and global CEO said: “Bullying is one of the biggest challenges facing the health and wellbeing of children and young people today.

“This research highlights that one-in-two of all online gamers, have at some point been subjected to bullying within a game.

“We believe that games should be fun and creative environments for everybody to enjoy.”

Previous research discovered that young people who are subjected to bullying offline were some of the biggest consumers of the internet and technology and subsequently more likely than average to use online games for escapism and to be free of ridicule and abuse.

“It is this relationship that makes our findings all too pressing and real,” added Liam. “Online abuse is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly if a young person is experiencing bullying both online and offline, the impact on things such as health, esteem and academic performance is only amplified.

“Safety is an essential need for all of us. If a young person never feels safe, their stress levels are constantly high, which can also undermine their physical health.

“The internet provides a unique opportunity for users to receive abuse anonymously - either from people they know offline or from complete strangers. Anonymous abuse has been found to increase rates of paranoia and social anxiety and can be incredibly distressing to those who are subjected to it.”

Many of the victims agreed: One child surveyed said: “I had to leave a game after I was bullied by a group of six or seven guys and it was really terrible. I’ve been depressed for a long time, and I couldn’t really play without being insulted.”

Another added: “The game was not worth playing anymore. The constant harassment was OK at the beginning, but it became the ‘game’, to get harassed.”

The charity found that 57 per cent of the young people it surveyed had been bullied online. It also found that 22 per cent of young people had stopped playing games as a result of it.

As many as one in seven children also admitted bullying others online. Some said they did so to avoid being targeted themselves.

Bullying seriously undermines the fun and enjoyment that gamers seek when playing online and the aim of the survey was to understand how best to combat game-based bullying once and for all.

“We carried out this survey in order to generate better awareness of the kinds of behaviour online platforms such as our own deal with,” explained Raquel Alvarez User Care & Safety, Director, Habbo.

“Our user care team works extraordinarily hard to protect our users and to promote safe online behaviour, and as increasing numbers of people go online to share aspects of their lives and communicate with other people, we feel the data gathered provides valuable insights for others wishing to do the same.

“In our opinion, working on important issues like online bullying is crucial as the Internet evolves and presents new challenges.”

Habbo is a virtual hotel where millions of people from around the world go to chat, play games and make friends. It’s a massively multiplayer experience in which users design rooms, game, play roles in various organisations, and even open their own shops and cafes. Currently, there are more than 120 million user-generated rooms spread across nine different communities.