The Annual Meeting of the PARTICIPATE Doctoral Network held at the campuses of Dublin City University on 14-16 November 2023 offered the first opportunity for all 10 Doctoral Candidates to meet for the first time. The event was combined with a review by the Research Executive Agency, the financing authority of the network that provided an opportunity also for the Project Officer to give advice to the partners, the supervisors and the Doctoral Candidates themselves.

10 brilliant and enthusiastic young professionals presented their research plans on topics related to parents’ role in relation to cyberbullying. The candidates, all of them women – similarly to all but one supervisors -, come from all over the world, from Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Russia and China. They are conducting research in doctoral programmes in Greece, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Finland, and one of them in a programme at Parents International.

In the coming 3 years, they will have plenty of opportunities to meet at winter and summer schools as well as network-wide trainings. The first such opportunities will be the winter school in Stavanger in February 2024 and an a 5-day training held at our premises in Amsterdam in March 2024.

Our own research fellow will work on the topical issue of bullying by teachers and parents, and the impact of this. It is a topic that we have planned to create more research evidence on for years given the research gap. The aim of this doctoral research project is also to develop a tool that will not be biased towards child-to-child bullying and thus will help schools to really explore the bullying situation in their institution, not just what is happening between children. We are also aiming to highlight that it is not only the bullied that are victims, but also bullies are usually holding traumas of being bullied.