Cyberbullying Prevention and Response

Expert Perspectives

Justin W. Patchin, Sameer Hinduja, Justin W. Patchin, Sameer Hinduja

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136735288
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Didattica generale

Just as the previous generation was raised in front of televisions, adolescents at the turn of the 21st century are being raised in an internet-enabled world where blogs, social networking, and instant messaging are competing with face-to-face and telephone communication as the dominant means through which personal interaction takes place. Unfortunately, a small but growing proportion of our youth are being exposed online to interpersonal violence, aggression, and harassment via cyberbullying. The mission of this book is to explore the many critical issues surrounding this new phenomenon. Key features include the following.

Comprehensive – The book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date look at the major issues that teachers, school administrators, counsellors, social workers, and parents need to be aware of with respect to cyberbullying identification, prevention, and response.

Practical – While the information is informed by research, it is written in an accessible way that all adults will be able to understand and apply.

Expertise – Justin W. Patchin and Sameer Hinduja are Co-Directors of the Cyberbullying Research Center (www.cyberbullying.us). Chapter authors represent a carefully selected group of contributors who have demonstrated both topical expertise and an ability to write about the topic in clear, easily accessible language.

This book is appropriate for teachers, administrators, parents and others seeking research-based guidance on how to deal with the rising tide of cyberbullying issues. It is also appropriate for a variety of college level courses dealing with school violence and educational administration.

1 A “LIVING INTERNET”

Some Context for the Cyberbullying Discussion

Anne Collier

DOI: 10.4324/9780203818312-1

It would be an understatement to say we all have a pretty good idea that the media environment our children are experiencing is not like the one in which we grew up. And yet, we see so many news stories, blog posts, books, school policies, and even research reports written from the perspective of that by-gone mass-media environment. It’s as if we know there’s something major going on, but we haven’t yet fully grasped it, maybe aren’t even quite sure we want to and – because we fear what we don’t understand – we expect, believe, or dwell on the worst implications and cases.

That’s what we’re doing when we think about our children’s “online safety,” I find as I survey the technology news headlines each day, talk to parents at speaking engagements around the country, and serve on national Net-safety task forces. One of those task forces found in its review of youth online risk research through 2008, that cyberbullying is the most common online risk kids face (Palfrey, boyd, & Sacco, 2009). But the extreme cases we see in the news are exactly that: extreme and far from common, and extrapolating the experiences of all youth online from those headlines is not good for our children. They find today’s social media very compelling and spend a lot of time communicating, playing, socializing, and producing with their friends, mentors, collaborators, relatives, and us in these new media.

Please note that I didn’t use the verb “consuming” in that last sentence. They do that too, when they watch all sorts of videos on YouTube or Hulu, for example, whether produced by peers or professionals, as well as watching TV and reading “content” in books and on the Web and all sorts of devices. “Consuming” isn’t top of the list, though, because young people’s use of media is considerably more active and less passive than that of previous generations.

But let’s back up for a moment and focus on just how different today’s media environment – the context in which the subject of this book, cyberbullying, occurs – is. When we were growing up, people consumed media; they didn’t participate the way our children do now. Media were produced by what most of us thought of as professionals and were distributed in one direction (“head- end,” as Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, wrote years ago, from the regulated media industry to the masses) through a relatively small number of “channels” (books, radio, broadcast TV, movies, etc.).

Now, all media – user-produced and professionally produced – are moving in all directions, in real time (instantly), and are all mashed up together on the same virtually unregulated, borderless platform_ the Internet. In addition to that set of revolutionary conditions, there’s one more very key difference: the social part. A large cross-section of today’s media environment, the part our children find so compelling – whether it involves text, music, photos, or video on phones, the Web, game consoles, and handhelds of all sorts – is social, or behavioral. And it’s all embedded in their everyday lives.

In effect, the Internet is a “living thing.” That’s what we, the Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG), called it in the title of the 150- page report we sent to Congress in June 2010: “Youth Safety on a Living Internet” (Nigam & Collier, 2010). We did so because we wanted to send a message to law-makers, as well as everyone who has an impact on children’s lives, that this highly social medium our kids find so compelling can’t really be handled the way media were in the past, whether by regulators in Washington, school officials, or parents in households throughout the country (or the world in a global media environment).

First, let me repeat for emphasis that this is not just technology, media, or “content” I’m talking about. And it’s not just about young people’s use of it. The Internet, as we all are using it now, is the product of a growing portion of humanity’s creativity, learning, production, and sociality; it mirrors them as well as serves as a platform for them. The fixed – and increasingly mobile – Internet is another “place” where our socializing, gaming, productions (blogs, family photos, videos, etc.), research, communication, and many aspects of our lives – positive, negative, and neutral – play out in real time. But not separate from or in addition to “real life”; rather, all this activity is rooted in it and part of it.

What does all this mean where young people’s online safety is concerned? A lot of things. Here is just a sampler:

1. The new meaning of “content.” We’re talking about behavioral as well as informational content. Cyberbullying is just one very negative example of behavioral content. It might take the form of a conversation, carried out in text messages on two people’s cell phones, that turns into an argument and ends up with a cruel message posted on a Facebook page. Or a friend becoming an ex- friend and using a password shared in confidence to post mean things about a third party that gets the password owner in trouble. A person can be blocked from commenting on a Facebook wall or sending text messages, but it’s impossible to block behavior happening in real time (e.g., to stop a mean comment when you don’t know it’s coming), the way filtering software blocks content: It’s like trying to anticipate a particular behavior in a social interaction or to isolate a single child’s part of a social circle’s activity. A colleague of mine recently likened social networking sites to oil rigs – they’re more like the infrastructure around the “product” and definitely not the producers of it. But even that metaphor breaks down when we consider how life-like the product is, that it’s the expression of at least parts of people’s lives, and it changes as they and their lives do. It’s also not necessarily a single person’s selfexpression. Very often it expresses real-life relations between two or more people, the expression of which is hard for a single participant to control.
2. It’s constantly changing. What we’re talking about is a “moving target.” That goes for the Internet, its “content,” and its users. Its dynamic conditions, added to its diversity, mean that: (1) once-and-for-all, one-size-fits-all solutions do not exist; (2) it’s tough to regulate or legislate adolescent behavior; and (3) we need a very large “toolbox” with a diverse array of “tools” for protecting kids at different developmental stages and in different situations, just like in real life (for some additional ideas, see especially Chapter 8). Those tools include education (including an ongoing parent-child conversation), a range of filtering and other technologies, families’ values (such as the Golden Rule or “our family treats people with respect”), family and school rules and policies, sometimes mental healthcare, law enforcement, and privacy and safety features in websites and on devices. And ideally, each tool is calibrated to individual kids’ changing maturity and trust levels. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this: Because the content (i.e., behavior) changes as the kid changes, so the “tools” need to be calibrated. As parenting has always been offline, so it goes with online kids.
3. The Net is everywhere. This is in terms of both location and devices. It may be filtered on computers at school and home, but much less on the cell phones that – according to early 2010 data from the Pew/Internet researchers – 75% of US 12–17-year-olds own and usually take with them to school (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010), where it’s tough to enforce policies concerning devices that fit in pockets and under desks. It’s difficult to regulate behavior in a medium produced from the grassroots up, whether the “regulator” is a technology, a parent, a school, or a government. What that means is that the onus is more and more on education rather than regulation – on creating cultures of self-regulation which include critical thinking about the content consumed or downloaded, as well as posted or uploaded, and respect for others at home and school. As my co-director of ConnectSafely.org, Larry Magid, put it back in the late 1990s, “the best filter is the one between kids’ ears.” That is even more true today, as the Internet has become so user-driven. A February 2010 report released by Ofsted, the UK education watchdog, deemed “outstanding” in online-safety instruction and practices schools that were employing “managed” rather than “locked down” filtering. The “managed” filtering schools did not employ across-the-board strict filtering, but rather taught students to “take responsibility themselves” for using the Internet safely (Ofsted, 2010). They did so by helping students to assess the risk of accessing certain sites. For example, at the elementary level in one of the top five schools, students are taught to ask themselves these questions: “Who wrote the material on this site?”; “Is the information on it likely to be accurate or could it be altered by anybody?”; “If others click onto the site, can I be sure that they are who they say they are?”; and “What information about myself should I not give out on the site?” The BBC cited Ofsted inspectors as saying that “pupils given a greater degree of freedom to surf the Internet at school are less vulnerable to online dangers in the long-term” (Sellgren, 2010). The Ofsted report points to the ever-growing importance of teaching children a new media literacy that develops on-the-spot critical thinking about what they’re sharing and uploading (how they’re behaving toward others) – on computers, cell phones, game consoles, handhelds, and so on – as well as what they’re seeing, reading, and downloading.
4. It’s embedded in “real life.” I mentioned this before, but let’s drill down because it’s so important. The research shows that young people’s social lives happen both online and offline, and on multiple devices, as well as in school and at home (Ito, Horst, Bittani, boyd, Herr-Stephenson, Lange et al., 2008). Adults often make a distinction between “virtual” and “real.” To the detriment of informed parenting, we often think about youth’s approach to media in a binary way – online vs. offline; entertaining vs. learning; public vs. private; bully vs. victim – where to them, as in life, it’s many shades of gray, a fluid experience. They just socialize, produce, play, do their informal learning, etc., whenever and wherever, with online being just one “location” in the “where.” What we see in Facebook, one of those hangouts, is the online expression of what’s happening in everyday school life, relationships, and peer groups – and certainly not all of the online expression, which happens just as much on cellphones, in gaming communities, and other parts of a vast digital platform So, when we think about that, how much can a single website realistically fix problems occurring in those settings, as some of us adults expect – for example, by getting Facebook to delete cruel comments, hate groups, or even the account of a socially aggressive child? A determined aggressor often finds alternative or multiple ways of acting out his or her aggression. Getting an account deleted from Face-book or Formspring – even if the aggressor doesn’t just set up a new (free) account in minutes, as anyone can – is unlikely to end the behavior, unfortunately; in fact, getting an aggressor’s account deleted could potentially make matters worse. Problems in relationships are usually resolved by the people involved and the supporters around them. The new media conditions do not change this age-old reality. What is often being talked about when we hear the word “cyberbullying” – which will be much better defined for you later in this book – is digitally enabled, 24/7 school drama (Collier, 2010). We all need to get better at distinguishing between cyberbullying and spikes of bad behavior, annoyance, frustration, and anger in the “reality TV” of school life. This book will help us with that. But for now, know that, just as there’s a whole spectrum of negative action and reaction in “real life,” there is on cell phones, in game communities, and in social networking sites too. It’s just that it’s all much more on display now, which naturally increases our anxiety levels, but which we don’t have to lump in with the more egregious phenomena of bullying and cyberbullying. Know, too, that some of what increases our collective concern levels and what is very different now, is the increased exposure of adolescent socializing, not the socializing itself – which is probably not that different from the socializing we did as teens.
5. So the risk spectrum matches that of real life. Because the Internet increasingly mirrors all aspects of human life, it mirrors the full spectrum of offline risks, not just the really frightening ones covered in popular TV shows or news reports about the most egregious cases, whether adult predation or peer harassment. Consider cyberbullying, the risk identified by the last task force I served on, the Berkman Center report of January 2009 (Palfrey et al., 2009), as the one that affects the most kids. Cyberbullying isn’t a single identifiable behavior happening on any single device or platform. Its range of causes reflects the complexity of school life, students’ own lives and teenage socializing; it requires a multidisciplinary, whole-school-community approach.

This very social medium is, by definition, a collective experience (affected by individuals’ actions). Safety in social media is a collaboration and sometimes a negotiation – a shared experience and outcome. Think about a group photo in Facebook. Because it depicts a group, its posting affects everyone in the group. The outcome, the way each individual in the photo is perceived by others, is an effect of one individual posting that photo. If some people in the photo – e.g., a party photo depicting underage drinking or a sleepover photo showing some people in their underwear – appear in a way that could cause negative reactions or punishment from some viewers, its posting could be an act of cyberbullying (or revenge, harassment, etc.). Not only because mean behavior often gets a reaction in kind, but also because we need to model and teach good citizenship online as well as offline, we need to help our children share media responsibly and respectfully, not just for their peers’ benefit, but for their own.

And, as if to illustrate how its complexity matches that of offline life, social media use is also very individual. As illustrated above, how positive or negative it turns out to be is determined by both the individual and by the tenor of his or her relations with others. An important risk factor reported in a 2007 article in Archives of Pediatrics is aggressive behavior itself; researchers found that aggressive behavior online at least doubles the aggressor’s risk online (Ybarra, Mitchell, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2007). This sounds a lot like “what goes around, comes around,” doesn’t it? So young people are stakeholders in their own well- being online as well as offline, and it behooves the people who work with them to help them understand that.

Another key finding in the Berkman task force’s review of the youth online risk research through 2008 (Palfrey et al., 2009) was that not all youth are equally at risk online. We found that the young people who are most at risk online “often engage in risky behaviors and have difficulties in other parts of their lives,” a strong indicator that – because the Internet and cell phone use are embedded in young people’s everyday lives – the risk spectrum online increasingly matches that of “real life.” It also indicates that young people who maintain positive, healthy relationships with peers may, generally speaking, be at lower risk of anti-social victimization ...