Cyberbullying remains a serious issue for young people in New Zealand and parents are being called on to help stop the "insidious" abuse.
NetSafe executive director Martin Cocker said one in four New Zealand school pupils was subjected to cyberbullying.
"It is a lot and that's because technology is now a common communications medium."
The way schools dealt with the issue, however, was "variable", with it generally being handled well.
"The place where we are all struggling is in trying to reduce the prevalence of it."
Bullying itself was a part of youth culture and hopes of stopping it entirely were "farcical", he said, but understanding why cyberbullying happened would be progress.
Researchers had recently started to see it as a covert form of bullying with its main objective being to isolate people from their peer groups, Mr Cocker said.
Wakatipu Abuse Prevention Network youth co-ordinator and education provider Julie Yeo said cyberbullying was a big issue and was "as common as the normal bullying".
The "quite dangerous" abuse occurred more frequently than outsiders realised and she believed parents needed to play a bigger role in monitoring their children.
With children as young as 8 having cellphones and social networking pages, their activity could go undetected.
"Parents can take a lot of control over what their young people are doing," Mrs Yeo said.
She knew of examples in which children handed their cellphones to their parents at 8pm and retrieved them in the morning, and of another parent who set up a social networking page for their child on the basis they knew the password and would regularly check it.
Those between the ages of 15 and 17 were a different case though, as communicating through technology was seen as an essential part of their life, she said.
In order to be proactive about cyberbullying within this age bracket, parents, peers and teachers needed to be aware and encourage victims and perpetrators to talk about their problems.
Otago Secondary Principals Association president and Blue Mountain College principal Kevin McSweeney said it was a "huge issue".
With no obvious victim, and anonymity for the bully, it was an "insidious" problem and difficult to deal with.
Since cellphones had become an essential part of teenage life, cyberbullying had been increasing, with threats, personal comments and gossip common taunts.
"Because it's not face to face it's even easier for kids to do."
While he believed schools, pupils and families had to work together to target cyberbullies, care needed to be taken, as raising it in people's consciences could have negative effects, he said.
Otago Primary Principals Association president and Opoho School principal Jenny Clarke said primary principals in the region had not raised cyberbullying as an issue for their pupils.
The Ministry of Education does not collate numbers of cyberbullying cases reported in schools.
