Cyberbullying which is defined as repeatedly and willfully harming a person or a group of people by using information and communication technologies has been a concerning issue among the educators regardless of the age groups that they work with. Existing prevention and intervention literature mostly includes research on victims of cyber bullying due to its negative impacts on victims’ psychological, social and physical well-beings as well as their academic achievement. However, understanding more about the characteristics of cyber bullies can add up to prevention and/or intervention of cyberbullying among young people. Therefore, this study aims to examine how cyberbullying perpetration is related to the variables of gender and moral disengagement.

The motivation of this study comes from the evidence emerged from the previous studies which reported that cyber bullies displayed higher levels of moral disengagement compared to the other groups involved in a cyberbullying incident. Yet, less is known about the role of gender in moral disengagement regarding cyberbullying perpetration. Thus, this study aims to contribute to the extant literature by investigating the moderating role of gender on the relationship between cyberbullying perpetration and moral disengagement. In accordance with this purpose, the present research investigated how gender moderates the association between cyberbullying perpetration and moral disengagement. Moral disengagement can be described as cognitive processes to justify damaging behaviors which usually violate a person’s moral standards. The digital environments seem to encourage the cyber bullies to engage in behaviors which can disagree with their moral agency. As the actions are happening in a virtual world, where there is no face-to-face contact, cyber bullies cannot witness the victim reactions or the impacts of their bullying behavior on the victims. These inabilities may lead the cyber bullies to justify their harmful behaviors since they seemingly did not physically hurt anyone. 

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