The Impact of Cyberbullying Laws on Student Cyberbullying By Sexual Minority Status

Background and Purpose: Approximately 15% of students in grades 9-12 in the United States report being bullied online (i.e., cyberbullied). The effects of being bullied can be severe, leading to depressive symptoms, substance use, and suicidality. Sexual minority youth are more likely to be cyberbullied than their peers and are at heightened risk of experiencing the consequences of cyberbullying. All 50 states have enacted anti-bullying legislation, but not all states include cyberbullying provisions. State laws regulating cyberbullying—including off-campus cyberbullying—may reduce cyberbullying and its effects on sexual minority youth. However, to our knowledge, no study has examined these possibilities. To fill this gap, we took advantage of a natural experiment that emerged: variation over time in state anti-bullying laws and their cyberbullying and off-campus provisions. Our objective was to evaluate the overall effects of cyberbullying and off-campus provisions in states’ anti-bullying laws on student reports of being cyberbullied and whether these effects varied by sexual minority status.

Methods: We used data from the 2011-2021 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (911,086 high school students in 44 states). Information on state-level cyberbullying laws was collected from LawAtlas’s Policy Surveillance Program and the Cyberbullying Research Center, and verified using Nexus Uni—a legal database. Cyberbullying laws were categorized into three types: “strong” (including cyberbullying and off-campus provisions); “moderate” (cyberbullying provisions only); or “neither” (neither provision). We estimated difference-in-differences logistic regression models to evaluate the impact of state cyberbullying laws on self-reported cyberbullying. To model differential effects, we interacted cyberbullying laws and sexual minority status. We conducted three sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our estimates: 1) including other provisions in anti-bullying laws linked to reductions in bullying; 2) removing observations during the COVID-19 pandemic, given its potential to confound results; and 3) using a “bullied at school” outcome variable, as respondents could have interpreted that to include at-school cyberbullying.

Results: By 2021, 25 states had strong polices, 17 had moderate policies, and two had neither policy. Students in states that enacted moderate or strong policies were less likely to report having been cyberbullied compared to those in states with neither policy (moderate: marginal effect -.01, 95% CI -.02, -.00; strong: marginal effect -.02, 95% CI -.03, -.00). Sexual minority students in states with strong policies were 10.0 percentage points less likely to report being cyberbullied (95% CI -15.0, -6.0), while there was no effect of either moderate policies for sexual minority students or strong or moderate policies among non-sexual minority students. Sensitivity analyses did not reveal trends different from the main analyses.

Conclusions and Implications: While moderate and strong cyberbullying policies reduced bullying among all students, strong policies were particularly effective for sexual minority students. To safeguard the most vulnerable students, the findings underscore the continued need for cyberbullying legislation that includes off-campus provisions.