Sextortion: More Insight Into the Experiences of Youth
Earlier this year, thirty-six-year old Barton Scott hacked into dozens of Snapchat accounts to access explicit images of 14 to 16 year-old girls. According to court records, he manipulated and subsequently coerced victims into turning over their passwords, giving him access to images not intended for public dissemination. He then used those private images as […]
The Nature and Extent of Sexting Among Middle and High School Students
Sexting is the sending or receiving of sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images or video, usually via mobile devices. Despite widespread public concern about these behaviors as they occur among adolescents, including potentially serious legal consequences, relatively little research has been done to estimate the frequency of sexting among middle and high school students. The […]
Youth Sexting in the US: New Paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior
We have a new paper that has just been published by the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. As far as we can tell, it is the first article to report national-level sexting data from middle and high school students in the United States since 2011. It is based on our fall 2016 data. Below […]
Inaugural Issue of the International Journal of Bullying Prevention
The first issue is finally out. Hooray! And it’s freely available for you to download! Issues will be coming out quarterly, and so we’re cranking them out from now on. I’ve written about the goals and intentions of the journal here, and how it fills a huge gap in the existing knowledgebase by providing our […]
Thoughts on the Final Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety
The Final Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety came out this week, and it has created quite a stir among educators and civil rights advocates. I’m just not sure the 180-page document will do much good. For those of you not familiar, the Commission was brought together after the high school shooting in […]
Authoritative School Climate: The Next Step in Helping Students Thrive
I’m always on the lookout for innovative approaches to improve student well-being and to create healthy, thriving communities – whether online or on campus. And as you know, Justin and I have examined a number of factors over the years which affect the experience of youth during their journey through adolescence. School climate has been […]
Connecting Adolescent Suicide to the Severity of Bullying and Cyberbullying
While previous studies have identified that school bullying and cyberbullying victimization among adolescents is associated with suicidal thoughts and attempts, no work has measured the severity of bullying incidents and their impact on the youth at school within that context. As such, a survey was distributed to a representative sample of U.S. youth between the […]
Sextortion Among Adolescents
Thirteen-year-old Amanda Todd made a mistake. The British Columbia teen had just moved to a new town and turned to the Internet to meet people. She’d been chatting online with a man whom she’d become interested in. He said she was pretty. After more than a year of communicating with the man, he convinced her […]
Sextortion Among Adolescents: Results From a National Survey of U.S. Youth
Sextortion is the threatened dissemination of explicit, intimate, or embarrassing images of a sexual nature without consent, usually for the purpose of procuring additional images, sexual acts, money, or something else. Despite increased public interest in this behavior, it has yet to be empirically examined among adolescents. The current study fills this gap by exploring […]
Are “Gamers” More Likely to be “Bullies”?
Conventional wisdom and media headlines would have one believe that those who play video games are more at risk for engaging in a host of anti-social behaviors. There is certainly nothing new about this mentality: It was prominent in my 80s-era adolescence as well. I remember spending many hours playing Mortal Kombat on the classic […]
