Jakia Rahman, Muhammad Kamal Uddin, S. M. Abu Bakar Siddique, Protyasha Bhattacharyya
Abstract
The present paper studies about how Cybercrime affects the young generation. However, the risk factor of being victimized in cyberspace is unknown. The present study tested predictions that (a) parental rejection might be the risk factor of cyber victimization, and (b) parental rejection can affect cyber victimization partially through cyber aggression among high school children. The sample consisted of 303 high school children (53% boys & 47% girls). Participants’ mean age was 14.89 years (SD = 1.11), with a range of 12 through 19 years. They were selected from six different schools of the Dhaka city by using convenience sampling technique. The instruments used in this study were Personal Information Form, Cyber-aggression Questionnaire for Adolescent, Child Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire: Father Short Form, Cyber-victimization Questionnaire for Adolescents, and Child Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire: Mother Short Form. Mean, Standard deviation, t test, correlation and regression analyses were performed to analyze data. The results of this study revealed that there is no gender difference in all the major variables except maternal acceptance-rejection. Pearson product moment correlations demonstrated significant associations among the variables indicating that the higher the parental rejection the higher was both the cyber aggression and the cyber victimization. Mediation regression analyses revealed that parental (both maternal and paternal) rejection had a non-significant direct effect on cyber victimization. Analyses further exhibited significant, indirect effect of maternal rejection through cyber aggression on cyber victimization. Multiple regression analysis
showed that maternal and paternal rejection jointly explained about 5% variance in cyber aggression and 7% in cyber victimization among high school children.
Keywords: cyber victimization, perceived parental acceptance-rejection, cyber aggression