PARTICIPATE Final Conference

On 11 and 12 June 2026, the PARTICIPATE project will gather in Brussels for its final conference at the Thon Hotel EU: two days dedicated to cyberbullying prevention and intervention, and to the research, tools, and partnerships developed across the network. Day 1 will focus on policy and practice. Day 2 will present the research results produced by the project’s ten Doctoral Candidates. Together, the two days reflect what PARTICIPATE has been about from the beginning: building knowledge that does not remain inside academia, but helps improve the real systems that shape children’s digital lives.

This matters because bullying and cyberbullying are not a marginal issue. The project begins from a simple but urgent recognition: online bullying has become a major societal problem, affecting young people’s wellbeing, safety, belonging, and rights in increasingly complex digital environments. PARTICIPATE was created to respond to that challenge by bringing together leading experts in anti-cyberbullying research and by training a new generation of researchers able to work across disciplines, sectors, and national contexts. It does so as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network under Horizon Europe, with the explicit aim of contributing to both policy and practice in parent-focused cyberbullying prevention and intervention.

What makes PARTICIPATE distinctive is not only its academic ambition, but the perspective it introduces. Parents are central to children’s digital lives, yet they have often been underrepresented in cyberbullying research and in the design of prevention and intervention strategies. PARTICIPATE addresses that gap directly. The project was designed to investigate the role of parents at a scale not previously attempted in this field, while also developing practical knowledge that can support teachers, professionals, youth organisations, policymakers, and families themselves. In other words, the project does not ask only how cyberbullying happens. It asks how the adults around children can be better equipped to prevent it, respond to it, and reduce its harm.

That is also why the final conference has been structured across two complementary days. The first afternoon, dedicated to “PARTICIPATE messages for policy and practice,” is designed to showcase the practical and policy-facing dimension of the project. It will focus on the tools, approaches, and key messages emerging from the network, and on their relevance for professionals and decision-makers who need evidence they can actually use. The second day, “Introducing the PARTICIPATE research results,” will present the academic work of the ten Doctoral Candidates and the different strands of research that together define the project’s contribution.

Those contributions are broad, timely, and closely connected to the realities children and families face online. Across the network, the ten research projects examine cyberbullying through different lenses: family-school partnerships, parental mediation, gender and diversity, identity-based bullying, harmful online environments, measurement issues, school action, and the wider social conditions that shape online harm.

Some studies focus on the experiences of parents whose children become involved in abusive online spaces. Others investigate how children’s rights and parental mediation can be balanced in digital childhood. Others still look at how schools and families can work together more effectively, how gender and diversity shape cyberbullying interventions, how identity-based cyberbullying affects Sámi students or African and mixed-race youth, or how adult bullying influences children’s behaviour online.

Taken together, these projects show why a single-issue or one-size-fits-all response to cyberbullying is not enough. Cyberbullying is not just a problem of individual behaviour. It is shaped by school climate, identity, inequality, platform dynamics, family communication, adult conduct, and the quality of institutional responses. That is why PARTICIPATE has been organised around four research-focused areas: the origins and impacts of cyberbullying; parents and teachers or professionals in interventions and communication; technology, social media and online bullying; and societal and cross-national aspects of cyberbullying. This structure has allowed the network to address the issue in a way that is both analytically rigorous and practically relevant.

The final conference is therefore more than a closing event. It is a moment to make visible what the network has built. Over the course of the project, the Doctoral Candidates have not only pursued individual research. They have also developed multidisciplinary skills, collaborated across countries, engaged with non-academic partners, and worked in settings where research meets practice. That combination matters. Cyberbullying cannot be reduced effectively through theory alone, and it cannot be addressed sustainably through isolated interventions. What is needed is stronger knowledge exchange between researchers, educators, families, youth organisations, and policymakers. PARTICIPATE has been designed precisely to create that exchange.

For participants, the Brussels conference offers a chance to engage with that work at exactly the right level. Those working in policy and practice will be able to explore the project’s tools, messages, and implications for action. Researchers, doctoral students, and academics will be able to engage with the findings emerging from the ten doctoral projects. More broadly, the conference offers an opportunity to reflect on what cyberbullying prevention should look like when it takes families seriously, when it recognises diversity, and when it moves beyond fragmented responses.

The venue itself supports that ambition. The conference will take place at Thon Hotel EU in the heart of Brussels’ European District, a setting that underlines the project’s cross-national and policy-facing character. Registration is open through the conference form, and participants can also consult the dedicated page for practical information about travel, access, and accommodation options linked to the venue.

As PARTICIPATE reaches this final stage, its core message is clear. Better responses to cyberbullying require better research, but they also require better connections: between evidence and action, between schools and families, between technology and responsibility, and between the people who study online harm and the people who confront it in daily life. The final conference in Brussels is where those connections come together.

To learn more about the full range of doctoral work behind the project, readers can also explore the dedicated Research Projects page, which presents all ten studies and the questions they address across Europe.

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHs2T6Rftl9O-lMg3N7qocgoET2zy3bYu6lGhEYaFFKI3qAA/viewform?usp=publish-editor