Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights

About a third (32%) of US online teens, or some 8 million kids, have been cyberbullied - girls more than boys (38% vs. 26%) and older girls more than younger ones (41% aged 15-17 vs. 34% aged 12-14). That’s according to a national survey the Pew Internet & American Life Project just released. Interestingly, despite all we hear about Internet-based harassment, the respondents told Pew they’re more likely to be bullied offline than online. More than two-thirds (67%) of the 12-to-17-year-olds Pew/Internet surveyed said that, while 29% said bullying happens more online, and 3% online and offline equally (I probably would’ve been among the 3% saying it was both), bullying and harassment happen more offline than online.

The study found that the online version of harassment, “depending on the circumstances,” can fall anywhere on the annoyance spectrum from “relatively benign” to “truly threatening.” Toward the more damaging end of this Richter scale are tactics like “receiving threatening messages, having private emails or text messages forwarded without [one’s] consent; having an embarrassing picture posted without [one’s] permission; or having rumors about them spread online.” The most common tactic experienced among the four Pew asked its respondents about was “someone taking a private email, IM, or text message you sent them and forwarding it to someone else or posting it where others could see it,” for example in a profile or blog.

Pew/Internet asked the teens why people bully online, and they gave four basic answers: that the Net is just another venue for a fact of adolescent life, the convenience and access technology provides, the anonymity of the Net that encourages bullying (psychologists call this “disinhibition”), and the intolerance that fuels bullying. In this digital age, study author Amanda Lenhart writes, “the impulses behind [bullying] are the same, but the effect is magnified.” We’re of course talking about sites with millions of members where the “publisher” loses control of the content the minute it’s “published,” which means the damage can be broader in scope and can last much longer (see social media researcher danah boyd’s view on this in the bullets below).

In addition to the phone survey, Pew/Internet conducted focus groups with teens. Parents might want to note one of the anecdotes shared by a 15-year-old boy in one of the groups: “I played a prank on someone but it wasn’t serious…. I told them I was going to come take them from their house and kill them and throw them in the woods. It’s the best prank because it’s like ‘oh my god, I’m calling the police’ and I was like ‘I’m just kidding, I was just messing with you.’ She got so scared though.” A 16-year-old New York boy was recently arrested and pleaded guilty for making a similar threat online concerning a teacher (see below).

One of the most important online safeguards for youth going forward is critical thinking – thinking through the implications of their actions online so they can avoid embarrassment, victimization, and even arrest for actions that never saw the light of day when we were kids!

Related links

What’s different online: In an interview with Alternet.org last winter, social media researcher danah boyd (who prefers her name lower-cased) explained what’s different about socializing (and bullying) online: “persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence - what you say sticks around. Searchability - my mother would have loved the ability to sort of magically scream into the ether to figure out where I was when I'd gone off to hang out with my friends. She couldn’t, thank God. But today when kids are hanging out online because they've written [themselves] into being online, they become very searchable. Replicability - you have a conversation with your friends, and this can be copied and pasted into your Live Journal and you get into a tiff. That creates an amazing amount of ‘uh ohs’ when you add it to persistence. And finally, invisible audiences. In an unmediated environment, you can look around and have an understanding of who can possibly overhear you. You adjust what you're saying to the reactions of those people. You figure out what is appropriate to say, you understand the social context. But when we're dealing with mediated environments, we have no way of gauging who might hear or see us, not only because we can't tell whose presence is lurking at the moment, but because of persistence and searchability.”

On disinhibition: “Social intelligence & youth”

Online threats: The New York teen who made threats against a teacher in a YouTube video.

The survey’s URL again: “Cyberbullying & Online Teens”

A sampler of the worldwide coverage of this study: NewKerala.com in India, The Times in the UK, ElectricNews.net in Ireland, and the AP at CNN in New York.