News for the Week of October 5, 2008
"Cyberbullying," in the recent past just adult lingo for bullying online, is becoming a blanket term even kids use for just about any form of online harassment done by peers to peers. Researchers are seeking a better sense of definition (see this), but meanwhile fresh data for online peer harassment out of the University of California....
Online harassment: Fresh numbers
Psychologists at UCLA report that 72% of 12-to-17-year-olds they surveyed were "bullied online at least once during a recent 12-month period," "only one in 10 reported such cyber-bullying to parents or other adults," and 85% "also experienced bullying in school." The harassment most frequently took the forms of "name-calling or insults" and "most typically took place through instant messaging." A bit more on frequency of incidents: The study found that 41% of teens surveyed reported 1-3 "bullying incidents" during those 12 months, 13% 4-6 incidents, and 19% seven or more. About two-thirds of the harassment victims knew their harassers and half knew them from school. The authors reinforced this finding with the point that "the Internet is not functioning as a separate environment but is connected with the social lives of kids in school."
Not telling their parents
Let's look at the part about not reporting incidents: The most common reason cited by the teens surveyed was interesting: They said they "believe they 'need to learn to deal with it.'" Next (31%) was the one I would've expected to top the list: parents might restrict their Net access. "This concern was especially common among girls between the ages of 12 and 14, with 46% fearing restrictions, compared with 27% of boys in the same age group," the authors said. No. 3 among younger teens was the fear of "getting in trouble." Here's a good heads-up from lead researcher Jaana Juvonen: "Many parents do not understand how vital the Internet is to their social lives. Parents can take detrimental action with good intentions, such as trying to protect their children by not letting them use the Internet at all. That is not likely to help parent-teen relationships or the social lives of their children."
Tell them not to retaliate
In its coverage, CNET asks the intelligent question: "It's important to teach children the importance of not becoming bullies themselves, is it not?" The answer, from an analysis by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, is yes: "Youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization," CACRC researchers wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The UCLA study appears in the latest issue of the Journal of School Health.
In other news...
- Felony charges for Ohio teen. A 15-year-old girl has been arrested and charged for "taking nude cell phone photos of herself and sending them to high school classmates," FoxNews.com reports. "On Monday, she entered denials to juvenile charges of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material and possession of criminal tools. A spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general's office says an adult convicted of the child pornography charge would have to register as a sexual offender, but a judge would have flexibility on the matter with a convicted juvenile." A prosecutor told Fox News that authorities are also considering charging students who received the photos. The girl spent the weekend in jail, the Arizona Republic reports.
- Good US online-safety bill passed. Actually, online-safety education is only one part of the just-passed "Broadband Data Improvement Act" designed to improve our understanding of how much of the US has high-speed Internet access so the government can "ensure the continued rollout of broadband access, as well as the successful deployment of the next generation of broadband technology," as one of the bill's sponsors, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), put it, ConsumerAffairs.com reports. The bill charges the Federal Trade Commission with establishing (within 90 days of enactment) an Internet safety and tech working group of experts in public and private sectors, creating a nationwide Net-safety public-awareness program, and promoting best practices within the Internet industry. Here's the view on this from the Consortium for School Networking and the International Society for Technology in Education and the National PTA. Search for the bill's full text here (I'd give you a direct link, but all links are temporary in the Library of Congress search engine).
- UK's new national online-safety council. Britain has unleashed a new Net-safety watchdog, the BBC reports. Called the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, it's the panel called for in British psychologist Tanya Byron's Action Plan, which resulted from the year-long study she conducted at Prime Minister Brown's request. Announced by British Children’s Secretary Ed Balls and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, the council has representatives from more than 100 organizations in both public and private sectors, including social-network companies and children's advocates, according to the Children's Office press release. The council's charged with educating the public about safety on the social Web and, among other things, establish what we call "best practices" - as the BBC puts it, "voluntary codes of practice, with an examination of how websites handle videos or messages posted by users."
- Euro social networking full speed ahead. The social Web has solid support from the European Commission. In fact, the EC's now looking ahead to Web 3.0, which means "seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks" and "the end of the divide between mobile and fixed [phone] lines," said Viviane Reding, EC Commissioner for Information Society & Media, in a September 26 speech in Luxembourg, according to VNUNET. Europe "must lead the next generation of the Internet," she said. The EC is encouraging SN industry self-regulation and has created a task force to that end, PublicTechnology.net reports. Participants include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Amsterdam-based Hyves, Berlin-based StudiVZ, and Paris-based Skyrock; "a number of researchers and child welfare organisations. The EC reportedly plans to unveil best-practice guidelines for social-network sites on Safer Internet Day next February 10. For context, 7thSpace.com reports, social networking has grown 35% in Europe in the past year. It added that 56% of Europe's online population visited social-network sites last year, and the number of regular users is projected to increase from 41.7 million now to 107.4 million in the next four years.
- Teen uber-texters. You do know that American cellphone users send more text messages than they make calls on those phones, right? That was the case almost a year ago. "Since then, the average subscriber's volume of text messages has shot upward by 64%, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly," the New York Times reports, citing Nielsen Mobile data. But forget about all that. It's the teen-texting data that really makes heads spin: 13-to-17-year-olds send or receive 1,742 messages a month. (It's downhill from there - 18-to-24-year-olds average a mere 790 a month.) The Times adds that "a separate study of teenagers with cellphones by Harris Interactive found that 42% of them claim that they can write text messages while blindfolded."
