Australian students report cyberbullying doubled since 2022, ANU study finds

A new Australian National University study of 4,800 students aged 12 to 17 has found that reported cyberbullying victimisation doubled between 2022 and 2024, with 38 per cent of respondents experiencing online harassment in the past year compared to 19 per cent in 2022. Researchers attribute the sharp increase to the migration of abusive behaviour to direct-message channels on Instagram, Snapchat and Discord, where adult oversight is minimal and content often disappears, and note that traditional school-based anti-bullying programs have limited reach into these private spaces. The findings were submitted to the federal Anti-Bullying Rapid Review and will inform updates to the National Framework.

The research exposes the operational gap between policy frameworks designed for visible, in-school behaviour and the private, encrypted direct-message environment where abuse now concentrates. Guardii's cyberbullying detection module operates precisely in that gap, monitoring conversation patterns across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox in real time to identify sustained targeting, escalation and coercion as they occur, and surfacing a child under attack to a parent or school before the interaction reaches crisis level. The platform detects threat patterns rather than reading every message, addressing the harm without the privacy burden of blanket content surveillance, and enables rapid escalation to the right authority when a pattern meets emergency thresholds.