Cyberbullying: new phenomenon or the playground gone online?
A new study from the Journal of School Health has been published that looks at the correlations of real world bullying and cyberbullying. Below is an article that summarizes the results. The actual study can be found here: Extending the School Grounds?—Bullying Experiences in Cyberspace.
My 2-cents: you will read in the last paragraph below that the authors of the study “feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon.” Well, no crap, dude. It’s pretty obvious that cyberbullying is transcendent from the playground. I mean, no one is going to – in fact how could you in all reality – bully a stranger? Especially a teenager, whose life pretty much stays within the town/school. They continue and say: “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online.” I think any parent, myself included, could have told you that.
They also say that anonymity doesn’t play such a big role, since most kids have an idea of who the bully is. To me, that is the biggest wow factor. But you also have to look at the fact that the victim may know who the bully is, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the world does. That anonymous screen name or fake screen name could be anyone to anyone. But to the victim, yeah, they probably have an idea of who it is because they probably see them on a daily basis face to face in school…
So what can we do? For starters, parents can install monitoring software like our PC Pandora on their machines. Statistics show that most kids won’t tell their parents they are being cyberbullied. It’s embarrassing. But monitoring software may give you the edge you need to obtain the information necessary to a) open a discussion with your child and b) collect evidence and put a stop to it. Now, if you are the parent of a bully (and I am sure NO bullies tell their parents what they are doing), monitoring software will clue you in and help you put a stop to it before it gets out of hand and your child gets into serious hot water.
Check the article out below…
Cyberbullying: new phenomenon or the playground gone online?
By John TimmerAs kids have started pursuing more of their social lives online, their parents have become increasingly concerned that they are taking their bad habits with them. But the anonymity and lack of direct consequences facilitated by the online world has raised concerns that cyberbullying may be a completely distinct phenomenon from its real-world counterpart. A study that was published in the September edition of the Journal of School Health, however, suggests these fears may be misplaced.
The study was based on a survey of teens, recruited through the social site bolt.com. The authors recognize that this probably biased their study population towards heavy Internet users, and restricted them to using self-reported data. However, they feel that their data complemented earlier studies, which required parental permission for the participation of children. The parental involvement, the authors contend, could have inhibited the children; indeed, roughly a third of their participants voiced concerns about discussing Internet use with their parents, lest they find their online time curtailed.
The recruitment produced a population of 1,454 teenagers, with an average age of 15-1/2 years old. Nearly 75 percent of them were female, which the authors performed statistical corrections for. Data was collected on length and frequency of Internet use, and the typical activities, such as Internet messaging and blogging, were tracked. Roughly half of the group used IM or e-mail daily, with IM being slightly more popular.
Although the term “bullying” wasn’t used, the students were asked to consider “anything that someone does that upsets or offends someone else.” Frequency of these incidents was rated on a five-point scale from never to greater than a dozen times a year.
Over two-thirds of the group reported an incident that could be described as cyberbullying, and nearly 20 percent of them reported seven or more such incidents. The most frequent means of verbal assault came on message boards and via IM. Like the playground, the most frequent form of unpleasantry was simple name calling; in a distinct online twist, however, password theft came in second. One other factor that was unique to online behavior was the use of webcams, which correlated with an increased probability of being targeted for bullying.
But the online nature of bullying didn’t appear to play a major role in its incidence. Two of the strongest predictors of whether a teen would experience cyberbullying were the amount of time spent online and whether they were the target of bullying offline. Anonymity didn’t seem to play as much of a role as some have feared, as nearly three-quarters of the victims were confident that they knew who had harassed them.
Oddly, although IM was the most frequent vector for bullying, a quarter of the targets didn’t bother to use the blocking capabilities built in to most IM clients. Even fewer (only 10 percent) notified anyone of the bullying. Again, the authors suggest that fear of having Internet access curtailed could be a major factor in this, as a third of the victims specifically mentioned this. But half also said that they felt they need to learn to handle it on their own.
The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online,” they conclude.
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