Curbing Cyberbullying on Facebook: An Analysis of Mitigation Strategies in Universities in Kenya

Cyberbullying is the wilful and repeated use of electronic devices and platforms to harm others. It is becoming increasingly practised amongst university students in digital spaces. This paper examines the mitigation strategies Kenyan university students and administrators adopt to help curb cyberbullying. The study underpinning this paper applied mixed methods research approach employing both qualitative and quantitative studies. The total population of undergraduate students was 610,563, while that of the dean of students was 49. The study used stratified and information-oriented sampling techniques. The study sample comprised 4,770 undergraduate students and 24 deans of students from 16 public and eight private chartered universities in Kenya. Quantitative data was collected from the students using questionnaires. Qualitative data was also collected from the students using focus group discussions and deans of students using key informant interviews. The study's findings indicate that students responded to cyberbullying by enhancing their online security, blocking perpetrators of cyberbullying, flagging and reporting offenders, seeking counselling, and taking legal action against them. The effectiveness of these strategies varied depending on the type of cyberbullying suffered. The authors conclude that cyberbullying is a prevalent socio-technological ill affecting undergraduate students in universities in Kenya. A myriad of strategies to cope with the vice has been adopted. However, this paper recommends concerted efforts of the students, deans of students, universities, government, and society in devising and implementing comprehensive strategies for curbing cyberbullying in universities in Kenya.


Introduction
Available evidence shows that cyberbullying is prevalent in institutions of higher learning and is becoming a significant concern. It is also evident that cyberbullying affects the students both socially and academically and can lead them to perform dismally, drop out of school, be expelled from college, get depressed, abuse drugs, have suicide ideation, or commit suicide. Despite there being existing research on the topic for decades, cyberbullying persists as a vice that affects students and needs to be addressed urgently. This paper critically analyses the mitigation strategies that both students and university administration in Kenya use to curb cyberbullying on Facebook. In particular, the specific objectives of the study are: to explore the strategies used by both students and universities in Kenya to discourage, prevent and mitigate cyberbullying on Facebook; examine the effectiveness of the strategies; as well as determine the awareness and effectiveness of policies in place to discourage, prevent and mitigate cyberbullying at the national level.
Bullying is aggressive behaviour by people who intentionally target their victims, intending to control them. It is a form of power imbalance or a show of strength over a perceived opponent and is mainly done repeatedly to one or more victims. According to Kwanya et al. (2021), cyberbullying is a type of bullying that is meted out on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The authorsexplain further that cyberbullying extends physical bullying from schoolyards to social media. The traditional form of bullying was physical and involved confrontations such as physical fights, verbal abuse through face-to-face encounters, social exclusion, and using gestures to intimidate others (Smith et al., 2008). In recent years, however, technology has redefined bullying and extended it to digital platforms in the form of cyberbullying. As emphasised by Johnson et al. (2016), in society today, people become victims of diverse forms of bullying.Cyberbullying is the latest entrant to the arena of bullying in modern society.
According to Olweus (2012) and Myers and Cowie (2019), cyberbullying is intended to cause harm to the victims. Smith (2009) explained that it is a form of online social cruelty and aggressive behaviour that is intentionally carried out repeatedly to harass a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself. Beran and Li (2007) also described cyberbullying as an act that is intentionally committed online or through digital channels to intimidate, embarrass, or harass a helpless victim. They averred that cyberbullying mainly includes name-calling, threats, spreading rumours, sharing another person's private information, social isolation, and exclusion. Notar et al. (2013) explained that cyberbullying is a prevalent and universal problem today. Johnson et al. (2016) added that it is a primarily prevalent vice on college campuses. Johnson et al. (2016) further echoed the sentiments of Beran and Li (2007), who explained that cyberbullying occurs online via electronic media and is a growing problem in learning institutions. However, other researchers, such as Olweus (2012), described cyberbullying as an overrated phenomenon, preferring to view it simply as an extension of traditional physical bullying in the virtual world. Olweus argued that cyberbullying has a low prevalence and that most cyberbullied are also being bullied in traditional ways in the real world. Cyberbullying is prevalent among young adults and has detrimental effects on the lives of post-16year-old students (Cowie & Myers, 2015). The authors argued that cyberbullying occurs in many forms. These may includebullies spreading nasty rumours about their victims. It may also involve discriminating against others based on race, gender, disability, religious inclination, or sexual orientation. Cyberbullying may also take the form of demeaning others, socially excluding others, cyberstalking, issuing threats, making unwanted sexual advances, or revealing confidential personal information about others that were shared in confidence online.

Literature Review
The themes covered in this literature review are the prevalence of cyberbullying in Kenyan universities, the consequences of cyberbullying on students and universities, and strategies used to mitigate cyberbullying.
Literature indicates a high level of cyberbullying in universities in Kenya (Ndiege et al., 2020). There is also evidence that it is growing and has become a concern as it exposes the students to a hostile environment, thus affecting their sense of safety and belonging (Kwanya et al., 2021). This is primarily because of universities' increased adoption of e-learning in the country to combat the spread of COVID-19. Consequently, students are spending more time online. This increases their exposure to cyberbullying. As a result, most undergraduate students in Kenyan universities have experienced cyberbullying (Ndiege & Kanyi, 2018). Therefore, there is an urgent need to mitigate the vice.
Cyberbullying has detrimental effects on the academic and social lives of university students. Severe effects of cyberbullying on students include social withdrawal, deteriorating mental health due to stress, anxiety, anger, depression, and even suicide ideation. In severe cases, cyberbullying can lead to suicide attempts and death (Martínez-Monteagudo et al., 2020). Cyberbullied students perform poorly academically because of a lack of or reduced participation in learning activities. They may also miss classes and drop out of university (Khine et al., 2020). Martínez-Monteagudo et al. (2020) further explained that the effects of cyberbullying on a victim might lead to a loss of self-esteem, high levels of anxiety, and depression, which makes them vulnerable to more victimisation from cyber bullies. Additionally, these emotional problems may lead to victims resorting to aggressive behaviour, which they may express by bullying back their oppressors, escalating the situation, and making the online environment even more hostile. A hostile virtual environment negatively impacts learning activities in universities. This is more serious now than before, given the predominant use of e-learning platforms due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mitigation strategies for cyberbullying in universities can be categorised into two tiers. The first tier is the response by students who are victims of cyberbullying. There are several actions that students who are victims of cyberbullying can take to stop cyberbullying. These include: ignoring the bullying behaviour so as not to escalate it (Golf-Papez & Veer, 2017); reporting or flagging cyberbullying content (Milosevic, 2016);seeking legal redress by prosecuting the cyberbully in a court of law (Hudson Jr,2020); blocking cyberbullies and enhancing online security (Byrne,2021); disengaging or leaving social media to avoid the cyberbullying (Ademiluyi et al.,2022); seeking social support from peers (Hellfeldt et al., 2020); seeking therapy and counselling to deal with the effects of cyberbullying (Alzamil,2021); as well as using their experience to create awareness on cyberbullying and its effects by starting anti-cyberbullying campaigns (Musharraf et al., 2019;Myers & Cowie, 2019). Additionally, some students may bully back as a defence (Souza et al., 2018).
The second tier of mitigation strategies is actions taken by the university administration to curb the vice. These strategies may include having firm university policies on cyberbullying. These policies should state acceptable and unacceptable online behaviour and the repercussions for violating the set rules (Jackson et al., 2018). In addition, universities can help mitigate the effects of cyberbullying by having strong guidance and counselling services to support students who have fallen victim to the vice (Saengcharoensap & Rujiprak, 2021). Another strategy universities can apply to curb cyberbullying is to create awareness of cyberbullying and its effects on the social and academic life of students. This should include guides on how and where to report cyberbullying and how students can protect themselves from online hostility (Owolabi, 2020). Universities can further integrate online safety and netiquette into their curricula and how to navigate online spaces safely and respect other users online (Alharbi et al., 2021;Awuor et al., 2019).

Gaps in literature
Most of the studies conducted on cyberbullying are from developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Additionally, these studies primarily focus on junior schools and have examined more teenage perspectives on the effects of cyberbullying. Furthermore, they only mention the gravity of the situation but do not comprehensively suggest mitigation strategies in university contexts. Similarly, they do not investigate the effectiveness of existing strategies in curbing cyberbullying. Importantly, Kenya's perspectives on cyberbullying are not articulated adequately. Therefore, strategies to curb cyberbullying on social media among undergraduate university students in Kenya remain a big problem that needs immediate attention. This study, therefore, fills this gap.

Methodology
The study adopted a mixed methods approach to collect quantifiable and qualitative data (Kwanya, 2022). The research specifically used the convergent parallel mixed methods research design. Here, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected autonomously and simultaneously. Data was collected from students and deans of students from 49 chartered universities in Kenya. The total population of undergraduate students was 610,563, while that of the dean of students was 49. The study used stratified and information-oriented sampling techniques. The universities were first stratified as private and public. From the strata, the researchers purposively selected 16public and eight private universities in Kenya from the former 8 Provinces, thus representing the whole country. The researchers used information-oriented purposive sampling to get the respondents whowere class representatives of all academic programmes offered in the selected universities. A census was used for the deans of students from the selected universities. Therefore, the sample consisted of 24 universities, 24 deans of students, and 4,470 class representatives. The study used a questionnaire, interviews, and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) to collect data. Data from students was collected using a semistructured questionnaire and FGDs, while interviews were used for deans of students. Quantitative data was analysed using statistical analysis with the help of STATA software, version 17, while qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis with the assistance of ATLAS.ti, version 9.
Findings of the study 3,020 (63%) copies of the questionnaire were filled and returned. A follow-up FGD with the students was conducted for the targeted 24 universities, and the response rate was 100%. Additionally, the researchers interviewed 24 deans of students from the targeted 24 universities giving a response rate of 100%.

Strategies students use to cope with cyberbullying and their effectiveness
When asked to explain how they coped with cyberbullying, the respondents mentioned the strategies they used while indicating the extent to which they employed them. The results are presented in Table 1. Enhancing online privacy (61.6%) was the most reported strategy for coping with cyberbullying to a greater extent. The popularity of enhancing online privacy to deal with cyberbullying can be attributed to the fact that most social media networking sites have made provisions for their users to set their privacy parameters. For instance, Young and Quan-Haase (2013) examined privacy settings on Facebook. They determined that in addition to default privacy settings that allowed users to determine who could view their content, Facebook also enables users to reject friendship requests from strangers, untag images, and block content from users they do not wish to communicate with. Essentially, it is upon the users to define their privacy threshold. The other common strategies reported to a great extent include employing anti-bullying campaigns (41%) and flagging abusive content (40%). These findings revealed that social media users appreciated non-technological mechanisms of curbing cyberbullying. Indeed, some studies (Vandebosch, 2019) have demonstrated the efficacy of anti-bullying public campaigns in preventing or reducing cyberbullying incidents. Other researchers, such as Betts et al. (2019), also explained that anti-bullying campaigns emphasise the need to collectively address the vice regardless of whether one has fallen victim. They asserted that social media platforms could only be truly free from social vices like cyberbullying if all users of the platforms do not experience the same. Flagging abusive or offending content quickly goes hand in hand with antibullying campaigns because it rallies users to address the offences and call out the offenders. Nonetheless, some scholars (Choo, 2015) caution against using public antibullying campaigns, mainly through the mass media, to sensationalise cyberbullying and warn that this may lead to trivialising the vice, thereby making the campaigns less effective. Foody et al. (2015) also pointed out that anti-bullying campaigns, like other coping strategies, have limitations that should be identified and mitigated.
Disengagement was considered a coping strategy, but this does not stop cyberbullying from being meted. This finding underscores that most social media users are unable or unwilling to stay away from the platforms despite the risks (Gearhart & Zhang, 2014). Abaido (2020) conducted a study on cyberbullying among university students in the United Arab Emirates, which found that 84.6% refused to limit or deactivate their social media accounts because of cyberbullying. Most of them felt that deactivating their accounts would not solve the problem. Additionally, most social media networks would not immediately delete an account, but it would take two weeks after the request before the account could be closed. In the meantime, the bullying would continue. For instance, Facebook allows users to deactivate their accounts, but this only hides the account profile from the public. However, messages earlier sent to the account remain visible on friends' accounts, and if the messenger is not deactivated, the individual will still receive messages from the platform. Deleting a Facebook account takes 30 days before all data related to the account is deleted. Therefore, it is unsurprising that 54.4% of the respondents felt that disengagement could have been more effective or moderately effective as a strategy to combat cyberbullying.

Strategies universities use to curb cyberbullying as discussed by students
The students were asked if they knew of strategies their universities had instituted to curb cyberbullying. They reported that the management of the universities provides guidance and counselling services for students, trains students on ICT safety, has policies against cyberbullying, and takes disciplinary action on persons caught bullying. Figure 1 illustrates the strategies used by universities to curb cyberbullying among students.
According to Chibbaro (2007), victims of cyberbullying are often fearful and stressed. They need counselling to develop their self-confidence and feel safe again. Sabella et al. (2013) also argued that counselling helps victims of cyberbullying deal with post-traumatic stress. Paolini (2018) explained that counselling helps both victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying. The perpetrators are helped to develop essential emotional and social skills and stop the behaviour. Victims are empowered to regain control and focus. Elbedour et al. (2020) suggested that counsellors can also reach out to the parents of both the victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying and involve them in the recovery process. In the current study, the students emphasised that counsellors must be personable and empathetic to be effective. Similarly, they suggested that the counselling premises should be in less open areas to keep the visits of the victims confidential. They also suggested that professional counsellors can train and involve students as peer counsellors to handle victims uncomfortable opening up to university officers. Dami and Waluwandja (2019) also suggested that counsellors should offer virtual services that do not require the victims to meet them face to face.
Improving undergraduate students' ICT skills also helps them enhance their online security and privacy. Several scholars support this strategy. Von Marées and Petermann (2012) explained that strengthened ICT skills build the students' confidence in navigating cyberspace. Kwanya et al. (2012) and Hongo et al. (2019) explained that effective netiquette was also essential in decreasing cases of cyberbullying. The other skills Good and Fang (2015) identified include digital citizenship, balancing offline and online activities, and online personal information management.
Cyberbullying in universities can also be curbed using policies prohibiting harassment, bullying, and online intimidation. Washington (2015) recommended that anti-bullying policies criminalise disseminating harmful information online. Myers and Cowie (2017) also suggested policies that create awareness about cyberbullying and its ills. They argued that this would help universities to avoid knee-jerk reactions to cyberbullying. Other scholars have also recommended antibullying policies to curb cyberbullying in universities (Cowie et al., 2013;Foody et al., 2017). While commending their universities for anti-cyberbullying policies, the students in the current study also asserted that the policies would only be helpful if implemented effectively. This study confirmed that universities currently take disciplinary action against perpetrators of cyberbullying. These actions include warnings, suspension, and/or expulsion. The perpetrators are also handed over to law enforcement agencies in severe cases. These actions are supported by scholars (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010).
The students were asked to indicate the measures their universities have taken or should take to support victims of cyberbullying. The majority agreed that there was guidance and counselling for victims. However, they pointed out that some guidance and counselling departments were not easily approachable by the victims and thus were ineffective. Suggestions were made that bullies should be fined and the money given to the victims of cyberbullying. Figure 2 summarises the strategies universities can use to support cyberbullying victims. Cowie and Myers (2015) emphasise that universities must support victims of cyberbullying among their students. Myers and Cowie (2019) castigated universities that embraced the view that "nothing can be done" to support victims of cyberbullying. Martínez-Monteagudo et al. (2019) suggest that universities should provide their students with environments that are safe from acts of aggression.

University strategies to curb cyberbullying as explained by the deans of students
The deans of students were asked to explain their universities' strategies for dealing with cyberbullying in their institutions. They identified having student counselling services and taking disciplinary action, which included suspension or expulsion of bullies. They also mentioned that cyberbullying was included as one of the outlawed behaviours in the student handbooks. The deans also had systems for reporting cases of cyberbullying. Some universities, however, did not have specific strategies and dealt with the vice on a case-by-case basis. Universities also used training of counselling and security staff on the management of cyberbullying cases, training and deploying student peer counsellors, and public lectures on the dangers of cyberbullying. Figure 3 shows universities' different strategies to curb cyberbullying, as discussed by deans of students.

Strategies the government uses to curb cyberbullying, as discussed by students
The students were asked if they knew the strategies the Government of Kenya has implemented to curb cyberbullying and how to improve the government's response. It emerged that most students were aware of the Computer Crimes and Misuse Act (2018). However, there were concerns that the law was not enforced effectively. They suggested that the government should create more awareness about cyberbullying and its effects. Figure 4 visualises the government of Kenya's strategies against cyberbullying in the country. These studies also emphasise that this role can be played effectively if governments allocate adequate resources to deal with the vice. Similarly, governments should demonstrate the political will to deal with cyberbullying. Otherwise, all the laws, however good they may be, will not help to curb the vice.

Strategies the society can use to curb cyberbullying
The students were asked to suggest the general society's role in curbing cyberbullying in Kenyan universities. It emerged that, to a large extent, society had normalised cyberbullying. It was suggested that leaders in society should be aware of cyberbullying and campaign against it. The students also suggested that parents should play a more prominent role in monitoring social media use by their children and teaching them etiquette on how to behave online. Figure 5 shows the suggestions for how society can help to curb cyberbullying in Kenyan universities. El Asam and Samara (2016) emphasised that the society needs to recognise cyberbullying as a significant ill. Consequently, it should not stand aloof in its mitigation. Tzani et al. (2021) asserted that society should treat cyberbullying as a severe illness that should be nabbed before it goes out of hand. Abaido (2020) explained that until society stands against cyberbullying, all the efforts by law enforcement agencies, among others, will not bear any meaningful fruits.

Conclusion
This paper concludes that cyberbullying has become a prevalent socio-technological ill in universities in Kenya. Undergraduate students, being youthful, are affected mainly by vice. Consequently, they have embraced numerous strategies to cope with the vice. However, these strategies alone cannot be effective. There is a need for a collective effort by the university administration, deans of students, the government, and society to curb the ill and offer adequate support to its victims. No efforts should be spared in curbing the vice; now is the right time to act.

Recommendations
The authors suggest the following strategies to enhance current strategies applied by the students, universities, government, and society to curb cyberbullying in Kenyan universities:  Victims should cease retaliating whenever they are cyberbullied. This would stop the cycle of bullying.
 Universities should develop comprehensive policies on cyberbullying. The policies should stipulate what constitutes cyberbullying and the strategies to curb it.
 Universities should integrate cyber-wellness into their curricula. This will assist the students to be aware of how to behave online.
 Society, especially parents of students, should instil online virtues in their children. Well-behaved children will not perpetrate cyberbullying.
 The victims should be encouraged to seek help. Universities should strengthen their guidance and counselling units.
 The universities should make reporting cyberbullying easy and confidential. The use of appropriate technology is advised.
 University administration should partner with social media companies like Facebook to develop and deploy strategies for mitigating cyberbullying.