Student violence on rise since pandemic

School sexual assaults at record high with 'deepfakes,' cyberbullying

(Getty Image)

The number of elementary, middle and high school students reporting being bullied at school increased for the fourth straight year, pushing the corresponding rate to 2 percent for the first time in 11 years.

With 1 out of 50 children having experienced school violence, the proportion of victim students was higher among younger students. The modality of violence became more insidious and adroit as the ratio of verbal and cyber violence took over physical bullying, according to the report by the Ministry of Education on Wednesday.

The ministry surveyed 3.98 million students nationwide from the fourth grade in elementary school to fourth-year students in high school in the first half of this year.

In 2024, the prevalence of school bullying in the national survey was 2.1 percent, up 0.2 percentage points from last year. The rate of students answering they experienced violence dropped from 2.2 percent in 2013 to 0.9 percent in 2016 and 2017 before rising again to 1.6 percent in 2019. The number again fell to 0.9 percent in 2020 due to an increase in virtual learning from the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, as schools returned to in-person learning, the rate rose for four consecutive years to 1.1 percent in 2021, 1.7 percent in 2022, 1.9 percent in 2023, and 2.1 percent in 2024.

The rates of victimization of peer violence increased as students got younger, with elementary school reporting 4.2 percent, middle school 1.6 percent, and high school at 0.5 percent, up 0.3 percentage points, 0.3 percentage points, and 0.1 percentage points, respectively, from last year.

Among the types of victimization, verbal abuse accounted for the largest share, taking up 39.4 percent of the total. This is up 2.3 percentage points from last year.

Amid the recent controversy over deepfake sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, especially among high school students, also increased. Putting it in third place of all violations, cyberbullying accounted for 7.4 percent of the total.

Deepfakes, which have recently become controversial in the country due to their widespread distribution through Telegram group chat rooms, also fall under the category of cyberbullying.

In particular, the victimization rate of cyberbullying was higher among high school students at 10.4 percent, compared to elementary school students at 6.3 percent and middle school students at 9.2 percent.

By type of cyberbullying, the most common types were "cyber verbal abuse" at 38.1 percent, "cyber defamation" at 16.6 percent, and "cyber ostracism" at 16.1 percent.

In the case of verbal violence and sexual violence, the ministry attributed the increased sensitivity of students rather than the increase in actual incidents to the rise in numbers, as what used to be overlooked, such as sexual jokes, are now being recognized as school violence.

However, actual reports of school violence have increased as there were 61,445 reports of school violence in elementary, middle and high schools last year, a 6 percent increase from the 2022 school year, which recorded a total of 57,981 report cases, according to the ministry's other data on the status of receiving and handling school violence.

Of these, 23,579 cases were reviewed by the school committee after failing to be resolved by the school principal, an increase of 9.3 percent from the previous year.

By Choi Jeong-yoon(jychoi@heraldcorp.com)