The Impact of Cyber and Traditional Victimization on Students’ Deviant Behaviors

Computers create different types of crimes, one of whose examples is cyber harassment. In contrast, there is another type of harassment called traditional one. The response of the people who are exposed to harassment as a source of strain appears in the form of deviant behaviors such as suicide and self-harm. The objective of this paper is to study victimization (cyber and traditional) as a source of strain on deviant behavior. Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory (GST) has been adopted as theoretical framework for this paper. In Agnew’s viewpoint, one of the sources of strain is the existence of negative stimulus; and, victimization (cyber and traditional) has been studied as a negative stimulus. The necessary data were collected through questionnaire for this survey.
The research population included all students studying in Mazandaran University in 2014-2015. The sample constituted of 400 students who were selected through proportional stratified random sampling method. The findings of the research indicate that victimization (cyber and traditional) leaves more impact on extrinsic deviant behavior of boy students, while it has more effect on intrinsic deviant behavior of girl students. Also the impact of cyber victimization is stronger than traditional victimization on the deviant behavior of students; and, negative emotional tempers of students are positive function of cyber and traditional victimization.