What if the type of bullying adults notice depends on who is watching—and where the school is located? In Pakistan, teachers reported more social and verbal bullying than physical or cyberbullying. Increasing reports of bullying and cyberbullying in schools in recent years are undeniable and have been recognized as a serious public health problem.

Conventional bullying and cyberbullying are not only a problem in higher educational institutions in Pakistan, but also in primary and secondary schools. Although statistics show higher levels of bullying and cyber-risky behaviors among youth, policies and interventions to control the consequences of conventional and cyberbullying are rare in the Pakistani context.

This study explores teachers’ perspectives and experiences in identifying bullying strategies in different school contexts. The issue of bullying and cyberbullying has gained prominence worldwide, but for educational institutions in Pakistan, this matter has yet to be studied in depth.

The vast majority of the data collected and published are based on respondents’ self-reports, which may be skewed by social desirability biases or misremembrance issues, thus undermining validity. The aim is to discuss the range of traditional bullying and cyberbullying in Pakistan’s educational system by including experiences of teachers working at different educational institutions.

The need for a socially and culturally adapted or newly developed bullying intervention is discussed using past interventions and data gathered from teachers. This review of the limited number of interventions in Pakistan has shown that there is a need for intervention of bullying and cyberbullying.

Most of the interventions adapted or adopted and applied were only focusing on one aspect of training, like engaging with physical activities, creating safe physical environment, or enhancing pro-social skills or emotion regulation of the victims. The study conducted a baseline survey to get a snapshot of what teachers believe about bullying incidents and what interventions they expect to be able to use to identify, combat, and stand up to bullying.

Teachers are the primary agents that can influence the entire school environment by introducing measures against bullying perpetration and victimization. The present study used a quantitative cross-sectional survey design to determine the prevalence of different forms of bullying in educational institutions of Pakistan.

The prevalence of bullying and its subtypes in educational institutions in Pakistan is understudied. The purpose of this study was to fill this gap by expanding knowledge about bullying and its categories in Pakistani educational institutions.

The study variables were assessed using a questionnaire in which teachers reported the prevalence of bullying among students as they perceived it. To assess cyberbullying from teachers’ perspectives, an adapted version of the Berlin Cyberbullying-Cybervictimization Questionnaire, or BCyQ, was used.

Teachers were asked 17 statements on a 5-point Likert scale, from never to frequently, to identify their perceptions of cyberbullying incidents among students. Using Google forms, a questionnaire survey was conducted online, and over 1,000 forms were sent to educators to invite them to participate in the study.

Teachers were informed about the study’s purpose, voluntariness of participation, and right to withdraw from the study. In total, 454 teachers from different parts of Pakistan responded to the questionnaire from November 2021 until January 2022. Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation in SPSS 27.

Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were computed using SPSS 27 and AMOS 22. Table two reports the factor loadings and reliability statistics for four bullying subscales. The final questionnaire contains thirteen cyber items, nine social items, seven verbal items, and seven physical items, with Cronbach alpha values of point nine three one, point eight nine eight, point nine zero zero, and point nine one nine, respectively.

The authors used exploratory factor analysis after satisfactory KMO and Bartlett’s test results, and retained thirty-six questions after removing items to meet model-fit and reliability criteria. The results regarding the frequency of different types of bullying incidents are shown in Table 3.

The purpose of compiling this information is to determine how many teachers have witnessed bullying incidents among students and shared their experiences. Teachers have witnessed more social and verbal bullying incidents, with mean values higher than 3, than physical and cyberbullying.

Table 3 summarizes teachers’ perceptions of bullying prevalence across four categories, based on four hundred fifty-four responses for each type. The reported means are two point six four one five for cyberbullying, three point one seven one eight for verbal bullying, two point seven nine four two for physical bullying, and three point three five two nine for social bullying; each category has a range of four point zero zero.

This matters because the results indicate which forms teachers report encountering most frequently, complementing the study’s validated measurement framework. The information gathered indicates that Facebook is still the most commonly used network for cyberbullying, followed by Instagram and TikTok.

Table Five summarizes teachers’ responses about the networking sites students most commonly use for cyberbullying. Facebook accounts for two hundred fifty-one responses, followed by Instagram with sixty-nine and TikTok with fifty-five, while the table records four hundred fifty-four responses in total.

This matters because it identifies the platforms most frequently reported in cyberbullying incidents, providing context for prevention and monitoring efforts in educational institutions. There is a significant decrease in the cases of physical bullying as the teaching level increases, which indicates that the physical form of bullying is more prevalent in primary schools than at higher educational institutions.

Cyberbullying is positively correlated with traditional forms of bullying, suggesting that institutions where cyberbullying is prevalent also experience higher levels of physical, verbal, and social bullying. There was a significant difference for social bullying, with an F value of 7.419 and a p value of 0.001.

No significant differences were found for physical, verbal, or cyberbullying. A Tukey post-hoc analysis found a significant difference in social bullying between rural and urban institutions. Urban teachers reported more cases of social bullying than their rural counterparts.

Teachers from urban schools were more likely to respond, with 364 participants compared to 63 from rural schools, leading to uneven group sizes. Table eight reports Tukey HSD pairwise comparisons for social bullying across urban, sub-urban, and rural institutions, following the significant one-way ANOVA reported by the authors.

The urban–rural comparison is significant, with a mean difference of .41619, a significance value of .000, and a ninety-five percent confidence interval from .1593 to .6731. The urban–sub-urban and sub-urban–rural comparisons are not significant, with significance values of .607 and .325.

The information collected in this study concerned bullying incidents among students observed and reported by teachers. Teachers noticed more social and verbal bullying incidents than physical bullying and cyberbullying. The opposite was found in other studies using data collected from students in Pakistan, where traditional and cyberbullying was a frequent practice in educational institutions.

There are limited interventions designed to control traditional bullying in schools and hardly any intervention for controlling cyberbullying successfully implemented in Pakistan. It is a major concern whether adopting Western school-based bullying control interventions would be promising in South Asia.

It is also a question whether overburdened teachers will be able to participate and implement the program successfully. This study serves as the basis for an anti-bullying intervention developed for a teacher training course. It is novel in that it does not rely on student self-reports of bullying incidences and frequencies as most previous studies in Pakistan have done, and it includes teacher perceptions and experiences.

The results show some clear differences to the research conducted previously in Pakistan. A major limitation is the cross-sectional design of the study, which generally does not accurately capture actual measurement invariance scores over time.

Similar studies are suggested with a longitudinal design, changing the sample size and including data from more institutions in different regions of Pakistan. The study argues that teacher-led interventions in Pakistan should be culturally and socially tailored, while recognizing that the findings reflect teachers’ perceptions from a cross-sectional survey rather than bullying measured over time.