A team from ABC was delighted to attend the World Anti-Bullying Forum 2025 (WABF) in Stavanger, Norway on 10th-13th June 2025. It’s been nearly a month since the ABC team had the chance to share their research, connect with colleagues, make new connections and learn from others.
The World Anti-Bullying Forum is an international forum and biannual conference that brings experts together from various disciplines to increase the understanding of bullying and other forms of violence against children and young people. The World Anti-Bullying Forum is a meeting place for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the work against bullying. This year, the forum was hosted by the Norwegian Centre for Learning Environment and Behavioural Research in Education from the University of Stavanger. The WABF is supported by UNESCO. There were almost 750 attendees from more than 50 different countries. Presenters included those from academia, industry, education, and also a youth panel.
Our travelling party included members of 3 different faculties – Institute of Education, Science & Health, and Humanities & Social Sciences, with a variety of roles represented. We were proud to represent a number of teams and projects from the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre, in the form of symposia, workshops, oral presentations and posters. We enjoyed the opportunity to celebrate the progress and achievements of the various projects at WABF 2025.
In total, we had 12 papers and 5 posters, representing research on online bullying and digital resilience, school bullying, grooming, self-harm, smartphone use, children’s rights, social dominance, online racism, participatory and co-design research with young people, autism based bullying, and community and parental contexts for online bullying.
Presentation highlights:
Symposium
Exploring the Impact of Smartphone Bans on Cyberbullying, Digital Literacy and Children’s Rights
Megan Reynolds, Sinan Aşçı, James O’Higgins Norman, Maryam Esfandiari, Sophie Butler
Workshop
Nothing About Us, Without Us – A World Café approach to elicit children’s views on solutions to bullying behaviour
Darran Heaney
We were absolutely delighted that one of our posters won the award for the best research to practice poster. Teresa Di Manno created a poster to showcase Tozi; it highlighted that Tozi content is evidence-based, that it is created and designed for children and young people and also celebrated the expansion of Tozi to other markets.
Full list of formal contributions from ABC to WABF 2025:
| Presentation Format | Speaker(s) | Title |
| Symposium
|
Discussant: Sinan Aşçı | Exploring the Impact of Smartphone Bans on Cyberbullying, Digital Literacy and Children’s Rights |
| Megan Reynolds | Exploring the Impact of Smartphone Bans in Schools on Cyberbullying Behaviours among Adolescents in Ireland | |
| James O’Higgins Norman | Irish Teachers Perspective on Smartphone Bans and Cyberbullying Behaviours in Schools | |
| Maryam Esfandiari | Rethinking School Phone Bans: Empowering Students with Media Literacy to Address School Bullying | |
| Sophie Butler | Children’s Rights in Tech: Mitigating the risk-factors of Cyberbullying Vs Protecting Children’s Rights | |
| Individual Oral Presentations | Sinan Aşçı | Towards Safer Online Spaces with CILTER: A Participatory Design Study with Adolescents |
| Workshop
|
Giorgia Scuderi,
Isabel Machado da Silva, Kainaat Maqbool |
Using Art to Engage Youth in (Cyber)Bullying Research: An Interactive, Creative Methodology Workshop |
| Symposium
|
Meghmala Mukherjee,
Luisa Morello, Luca Laszlo, Ebru Özbek, Serap Keleş |
Systematic approaches to understanding cyberbullying from different angles: contexts, consequences, and moderators |
| Workshop
|
Darran Heaney | Nothing About Us, Without Us – A World Café approach to elicit children’s views on solutions to bullying behaviour |
| Individual Oral Presentations | Darragh McCashin | Preventing Online Racism in Ireland: A Participatory Design Approach |
| Individual Oral Presentations |
Niamh O’Brien,
Audrey Doyle |
(En)Acting the complex findings from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) study on gender school bullying |
| Individual Oral Presentations |
Megan Reynolds,
Dylan Pidgeon |
The Role of Social Dominance Orientation in Bullying Behaviour: A Systematic Review |
| Individual Oral Presentations | Sinéad McNally | Autistic pupils’ experiences of bullying in schools in Ireland |
Further information is available on our presentations and posters, please contact us at abc@dcu.ie.
We thank our various funding partners, whose support has enabled the range of research showcased at WABF 2025.
