News for the Week of April 13, 2008
A tragic story prompts us to look at the many shades of bullying and cyberbullying...
Cyberbullying: Clarity needed
The New York Times story about high school sophomore Billy Wolfe, who has endured several years of victimization at his Fayetteville, Ark. school, puts a face on the tragedy of bullying. But it's also important to know how unusual this heartbreaking story is.
There are many, many shades of bullying and cyberbullying, we're learning from solid research, and it's important to understand this so that we in no way discount less extreme experiences of bullying young people have.
"Bullying can happen once a week or once a month; it can be an isolated event or something that happens for years; it can be online, offline, or both. It is a varied behavior and it can be upsetting and have psychological impacts across the board; or not. You do not need to be beat up every day and taunted in every environment to be affected," wrote Dr. Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids in a recent email to a few of us online-safety advocates.
63 percent of kids not bullied
Here are some brand-new findings from Michelle's latest "Growing Up with Media" study of 11-to-16-year-olds...
"School is overwhelmingly the most common environment that kids 11-16 years of age are bullied in," with almost a third of kids saying they've been bullied there. Eleven percent have been bullied online and 10% "in the community (e.g., on the way to and from school)." Six percent have been bullied by cellphone.
Only very small percentages of young people have been bullied monthly or more often - the most, 5%, at school, and 2% have been bullied that often online. Because being bullied monthly or more often is so uncommon, wrote Dr. Ybarra, "you can see how this particular subset of youth is particularly concerning from a health and development perspective."
In other findings, it's heartening to see that almost two-thirds of 11-to-16-year-olds - 63% - "are not bullied anywhere; 17% report being bullied in one environment, 9% in two environments, 5% in three, 2% in four, and a very concerning 3% report being bullied in all five environments assessed" (school, Internet, cellphone, community, and "other").
Important definitions
Michele also sent an important caveat for everyone concerned about cyberbullying: the need to be very clear on what we're talking about: "The term 'cyberbullying' (in my opinion) has been mis- and over-used to describe any sort of unwanted or untoward action that occurs online. The definition of bullying is something that happens repeatedly and over time, and is inclusive of an imbalance of power (this is a common definition in the psychology literature). Some of the things that we have heard about that have happened online fit this definition. Others are more akin to 'harassment' or 'defamation' or other things."
In other news...
- US Net-safety toll-free number debuts. A significant development in the online-safety field: Parents in the US now have a toll-free number to call with questions about topics such as social networking, cellphone texting, and virtual worlds. The bilingual hotline (English and Spanish) is sponsored by the Qwest Foundation and operated by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and is available to "paren. The free service started in February 2007 as a Web site - www.netsmartz411.org - where "parents, guardians, children, teens, educators and law enforcement" could type questions into a form and hear back from NCMEC experts within one business day or search a database of online-safety info. The new toll-free hotline number is 1.888.NETS411 (1.888.638.7411). Here's the press release.
- School's 'Facebook scandal.' That's the shorthand, but in this New York magazine story about Horace Mann School suggests that students' dissing of teachers in social-networking sites are more about a changing balance of power in the "real world." "Should they be punished? There were, as yet, no rules or codes for how a school should address such issues... But the questions provoked by the Web postings ran deeper than these. Who should make the rules? In the past, there had been at least a rough assumption that teachers were parental surrogates, authority figures who were charged with making decisions regarding education and discipline, and that the rules governing this kind of behavior were clearly the faculty's to make." This is a fairly unique school in terms of the wealth of its community, but its "Facebook scandal" is more a symptom - of major social change - than the problem itself. "The students were more aware than ever of where the real power resided. So when the Facebook situation was brought into the open, the teachers found themselves powerless to act, and the students did not passively wait to be disciplined." If you can make it all the way through the politics related, it's an interesting, slightly scary story about how the participatory Web empowers for good or bad.
- New tech helps detect child porn. The long-suffering image analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children must have one of the hardest, most emotionally draining jobs there is. Fortunately, it just got a little easier with the help of image-detection technology developed by Google, ConnectSafely.com co-director Larry Magid reports at CBSNEWS.com. The software eases dependence on an analyst's memory by scanning and detecting patterns that the analyst highlights in a photo - "a calendar on the wall, a logo on a T-shirt, a prominent tattoo or perhaps the pattern of the carpet" - in a database of child-abuse images. What's so sophisticated about this technology, apparently, is its flexibility. It "will work even if the images are modified, if a photo has been changed from color to black and white, or if the pattern is at a different angle or position in the photo or video. It can also pick out a single pattern in a video, even if it's a compilation of many shorter videos."
- We're all becoming Net-trained info-gatherers. Apparently we're all becoming the rapid-fire, uncritical information hunter-gatherers we had thought only our children were. Yes, they're the digital natives but, according to a new study out of the UK, the Internet is "training" all of us to approach information this way, which may mean we all have to work extra hard now to think more critically and analytically. A just-released longitudinal study from University College London found that, "although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the Web," its press release. Titled "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future," the study also found that the research behaviors "commonly associated with younger users - impatience in search and navigation and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs - are now becoming the norm for all age groups."
