Our Cyberbullying Scale: Two Decades of Measuring Online Aggression
When Sameer and I first became interested in studying cyberbullying back in 2001, we began our inquiry by simply speaking with folks. We talked with parents and teens, but also with teachers and other school staff, as well as law enforcement officers and anyone else who worked with young people. We wanted to know more […]
Addressing Youth Sexting Through Rational Legislation and Education
Sexting is defined as “the sending or receiving of sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images or videos,” usually via mobile devices. Our research indicates that at least 14% of US middle and high school students report that they have sent explicit images to others, while about 23% have received these kinds of images from their […]
Responding to Cyberbullying: Strategies for School Counselors
Technology has created many opportunities for students to be hurtful to each other in a variety of ways, and has made interpersonal peer conflict even more challenging for schools to deal with. This is complicated by the reality that youth have always been hesitant to confide in adults when faced with problems with peers. In […]
The Nature and Extent of Youth Sextortion: Legal Implications and Directions for Future Research
Sextortion, the threatened dissemination of explicit, intimate, or embarrassing images of a sexual nature without consent, is an understudied problem. Despite a recent increase in reported incidents among adolescents in the United States, little is known about the nature and extent of sextortion among this population. The current research explores sextortion behaviors among a national […]
Adolescent Digital Self-Harm Over Time: Prevalence and Perspectives
Digital self-harm, the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself, has not received the same amount of scholarly scrutiny as other forms of self-directed abuse. In the current paper, we analyze three independent national surveys of U.S. teens (aged 13–17, M = 14.96) in repeat cross-sectional studies conducted in 2016 […]
Digital Self-Harm: The Growing Problem You’ve Never Heard Of
Sameer and I first became aware of digital self-harm over a decade ago when we learned of the suicide of Hannah Smith. She was 14 years old when she ended her life after being mistreated online. The resulting investigation determined that the threats and hurtful comments directed toward her on the anonymous app Ask.fm were […]
When Your Mother is Your Cyberbully
Last winter when Sameer and I were writing the third edition of Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard (published last fall!), we spent quite a bit of time searching for unique examples of cyberbullying to include in the book. One of the more interesting cases I came across involved a 14-year-old girl from Beal City, Michigan. I […]
Cyberbullying Continues to Rise among Youth in the United States
Here at the Cyberbullying Research Center, we routinely collect data from middle and high school students so that we can keep on top of what they are experiencing online. Over the last two decades, we have completed about twenty unique studies of teens and tweens in the United States involving more than 30,000 subjects. And […]
Takeaways from the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory earlier this year entitled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” In this public statement, Dr. Murthy summarizes the (limited and often methodologically shaky) research related to adolescents use of social media. His primary focus is on mental health, though other aspects of child wellbeing are also […]
Take it Down: A New Tool to Combat the Unauthorized Sharing of Explicit Images of Minors
It has long been stressed that once you send an image to someone else, or post it online, you lose complete control over how that image is used and where it might end up. While this is still mostly true, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), with funding from Meta, has developed […]
