Bullying explained to children and teenagers. Knowledge dissemination, interpersonal meaning and participants’ roles on educational websites

In recent decades, bullying has received increased public and media attention. On the one hand, recent digital transformations have exacerbated the phenomenon leading to new forms of online harassment (cyberbullying). On the other hand, the World Wide Web has allowed parents, teachers, and children to access information and provide and receive support more easily. Particularly concerning younger audiences, educational websites serve as an important channel for popularization. Not only do they make topics in various disciplines comprehensible to children and teenagers, but they also tackle challenging issues to develop awareness in the youth and eventually encourage them to take action. These web-based educational hypermedia are rooted in “edutainment” (combining education and entertainment), interactivity, and multimodality, which are exploited to make sensitive issues more accessible to young audiences. In this context, the present paper concentrates on two health educational websites for children and teenagers (Health for Kids and Kids Health Hub), specifically examining their subdirectories on bullying prevention. The analysis explores how these two subdirectories disseminate knowledge about bullying and address the different participants in this phenomenon (bullies, victims, witnesses, teachers, and parents) from a multimodal and discursive perspective. Special attention is devoted to transferring knowledge via recourse to different types of explanation, and to the role played by image-text combinations in engaging users. These strategies are shown to reflect the type of information conveyed and the different roles represented.