Cyberbullying Statistics UK: 2026 Facts, Data & Key Insights

Cyberbullying — the use of digital technology to harass, humiliate, threaten, or exclude another person — has become one of the most significant and pervasive child safety challenges in the United Kingdom. It does not stop at the school gate, it does not require physical proximity, and in an era of smartphones and always-on connectivity, it can follow a young person into every room of their home. This guide brings together the most current data from Ofcom, the ONS, the Department for Education, NSPCC, and the Anti-Bullying Alliance to provide the most comprehensive UK cyberbullying statistics reference available.

Key Facts & Figures (Overview)

How Many Children Experience Cyberbullying in the UK?

The prevalence of cyberbullying in the UK depends significantly on how it is defined and measured — which explains why headline figures vary between sources. The range runs from 20% (ONS’s conservative definition of experiencing at least one online bullying behaviour in the past year) to 32% (Ofcom’s broader measure of experiencing bullying online at any point) for children aged 8 to 17.

Ofcom’s Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2024 — drawn from their ongoing UK-wide survey of children’s media use — found that 32% of UK children aged 8 to 17 have experienced bullying online. This is Ofcom’s most recent figure and one of the most widely cited in current policy discussions.

The ONS Bullying and Online Experiences Survey (year ending March 2023) takes a more restrictive definitional approach, counting only experiences of specific online bullying behaviours in the preceding 12 months. On this basis, 20% of children aged 10 to 15 in England and Wales were affected. Girls were significantly more affected: 22.5% of girls compared with 16.0% of boys.

The DfE’s National Behaviour Survey (May 2025) adds a school-based dimension: of pupils in years 7 to 13 who reported being bullied, 29% said at least some happened online — a figure that has remained consistent across the 2024 and 2025 surveys. Meanwhile, 87% said at least some bullying happened in person, confirming that cyberbullying in the UK is largely an extension of in-person peer dynamics rather than a separate phenomenon driven primarily by anonymous strangers.

Who Is Being Cyberbullied and Why?

The profile of cyberbullying victims in the UK reflects patterns seen in school bullying more broadly. The most common experiences reported by children in the ONS survey were receiving a nasty message (10.9%), being called names online (9.6%), and having something mean posted about them publicly.

Ditch the Label’s research among 13,387 UK students aged 12 to 18 found that 27% identified their bullying experience as cyberbullying — with name-calling, swearing, and insults the most common forms. The same research found that 57% of young people aged 12 to 25 had experienced bullying behaviour when playing online video games — a platform that receives significantly less public attention than social media despite the scale of the problem.

Gender is a significant factor. Girls are consistently more likely to experience certain forms of cyberbullying — particularly image-based abuse, exclusion from group chats, and coordinated harassment. Boys are more likely to experience bullying through gaming platforms. The emergence of AI-generated sexualised imagery as a tool of abuse — documented with a 240% increase in reports in 2024 (Guardian investigation) — is disproportionately targeting girls and young women.

LGBTQ+ young people face disproportionately high rates of online harassment. Research by the Anti-Bullying Alliance found that 43% of LGBTQ+ pupils are bullied because of their identity — and a significant proportion of this bullying occurs online.

Where Cyberbullying Happens

One of the most important — and most challenging — findings in the UK cyberbullying data is the location of the abuse. NSPCC research from 2024 found that 70% of online grooming and bullying cases occur inside private or encrypted chat apps — platforms including WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Discord where content is not publicly visible and cannot be monitored by platform safety systems, parents, or schools.

This creates an inherent tension for safeguarding: the abuse is happening in the least visible, least accessible digital spaces. A child can be subjected to sustained harassment through private group chats that leave no public trace, making it difficult for parents and teachers to identify even when a child is visibly distressed.

The school connection remains strong: 70% of children who experienced cyberbullying said the perpetrator was someone from their own school. This means that the perpetrator and victim typically interact in person as well as online, and that school-based interventions remain relevant even for predominantly online forms of bullying.

The Emerging Threat of AI-Generated Abuse

A significant and rapidly growing dimension of cyberbullying in the UK is the use of artificial intelligence to create fabricated harmful content — most notably, AI-generated sexualised imagery of real young people. A 2024 investigation by The Guardian found that reports of AI-generated sexualised imagery of minors had increased by 240% over the previous year. These “deepfake” images can spread rapidly through private messaging platforms, are difficult to remove once circulating, and cause severe psychological harm to victims.

The Online Safety Act 2023 provides new powers to address some of these harms, and creating sexually explicit deepfakes of real people without consent is now a criminal offence under the Criminal Justice Bill. However, enforcement at scale remains a significant challenge.

The Mental Health Impact

Cyberbullying is consistently identified as one of the leading causes of anxiety and depression among young people. The always-on nature of digital communication means that cyberbullying follows victims into spaces — their bedroom, family mealtimes, weekend activities — that once provided respite from in-person bullying. This denial of safe space is one reason researchers consider cyberbullying in some respects more psychologically harmful than in-person bullying alone.

The most serious mental health outcomes associated with cyberbullying include self-harm and suicidal ideation. Research links victimisation to increased rates of both, particularly where the bullying is sustained, public, and involves image-based abuse. Young people who experience cyberbullying alongside in-person bullying — the majority, given the 70% same-school perpetrator rate — have worse mental health outcomes than those experiencing either form alone.

Our Mental Health First Aid courses help education and community professionals identify and respond to the mental health impact of cyberbullying in young people.

Sources & References

Written by Mental Health Experts. This guide was produced by the team at Mental Health First Aid Course. We publish evidence-based data resources to help schools, parents, and community professionals understand the scale of cyberbullying and its mental health consequences.