When it comes to young people’s experiences of bullying, it’s a less straightforward story! In 2022 just over a third of 11-15 year olds in this study (36%) said they’d been bullied in the last two months, a very similar proportion to 2002. But in the intervening years, those numbers went down, and back up again, with some variation between the genders and an eventual reverse of the gap between them over the 20-year period.

It may be that the introduction of smart phones in the late 2000s/early 2010s is responsible for this increase. After all, it created many more social spaces online where young people could interact in positive and negative ways! We know that young women have been particularly affected by some of the more shady aspects of social media. Perhaps they have suffered slightly more than their male peers when it comes to bullying in the age of the iPhone.

And let’s also not forget those pesky algorithms that sometimes fuel societal polarisation. It's challenging to pinpoint a single cause for the rise in bullying. It's a complex picture, and we're working it out as we go along.