Vicarious Supervision: Preventing Problematic Behaviors Online through Positive Parent-Child Relationships
Lately we’ve been more directly exploring the role of parenting in preventing cyberbullying and other online problem behaviors. To be sure, parents* have a responsibility to be directly involved in monitoring and influencing the early online activities of their children. This could mean occasionally reviewing messages and regularly checking security settings, but should also include […]
Bullying and Cyberbullying Offending Among US Youth: The Influence of Six Parenting Dimensions
Bullying and cyberbullying prevention remain a major priority for schools, communities, and families, and research is clear that positive, constructive parenting practices can play a key preventive role. The current work explores six dimensions of parenting (warmth, structure, autonomy support, rejection, chaos, and coercion), and their specific relationship to school and online bullying. Using survey […]
Cyberbullying Statistics 2021 | Age, Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Race
Provides updated statistics on cyberbullying from a national study on US youth by age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. In May-June 2021, we collected new data from a nationally representative sample of 2,546 US youth between the ages of 13 and 17 to better understand their positive and negative experiences online. This is the type […]
Cyberbullying Among Tweens in the United States: Prevalence, Impact, and Helping Behaviors
The goal of this study was to provide key prevalence rates for experiences with cyberbullying among tweens (children between the ages of 9 and 12 years old). We were also interested in the extent to which tweens engaged in helping behaviors when they observed cyberbullying. American tweens (n = 1034; mean age = 10.52, SD […]
Bullying Victimization, Negative Emotions, and Digital Self-Harm: Testing a Theoretical Model of Indirect Effects
Research on digital self-harm – the anonymous or pseudonymous posting of hurtful or negative information about oneself on the internet and social media platforms – is in the early stages of development. While scholars have started to focus on the correlates of this behavior, there remains a need to anchor the study of digital self-harm […]
Defund the Police? Implications for Cyberbullying Prevention
As someone who teaches criminal justice in a university setting to many future law enforcement officers, I was appalled by the treatment of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department. Appalled, but not surprised. Regrettably, these incidents continue to happen at an alarming rate and the last month of worldwide protests have been […]
Digital Citizenship in 2020 and Beyond
Digital citizenship has been defined as helping youth “practice respectful and tolerant behaviors toward others” online. With the ubiquitous growth in personal device and social media use among youth – coupled with the adoption of more web-based technologies for education – many schools in the US and abroad have sought to teach digital citizenship practices […]
Digital Dating Abuse Among Teens: Our Research, and What We Must Do
February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, and we’re doing our part to help equip and empower young people to make wise decisions in their romantic relationships. Most recently, we published a new research paper entitled “Digital Dating Abuse Among a National Sample of U.S. Youth” in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence to illuminate how […]
It is Time to Teach Safe Sexting
It’s 2020. And it’s about time we rethink our approach to teen sexting. Justin and I wrote an piece that was just published in the Journal of Adolescent Health (currently free to download!) arguing that it is time to take a more thoughtful and comprehensive approach to sexting, by supplementing abstinence messages with information to […]
How Social Media Companies Should Combat Online Abuse
A new year is upon us. While we’ve made some progress in reducing cyberbullying, online hate, and other forms of abuse and toxicity, I think we can do better. Social media companies are often seen (and vilified) as accomplices to the harassment and victimization that happens on their platforms, and – admittedly – are an […]
