School Administrators Charged with Child Exploitation After Investigating Sexting

Last spring, Brush High School (Brush, Colorado) assistant principal Bradley Bass was alerted to a student sexting issue at his school. He and secondary schools director Scott Hodgson looked into it. They talked to some students who were reportedly involved, and determined that intimate images had been shared consensually. At least one student voluntarily showed…

Cyberbullying Among Asian American Youth Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

PURPOSE Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a concern that cyberbullying incidents would increase as youth were spending more time online. Additionally, reports emerged that Asian American citizens were being disproportionately targeted due to the purported origination of the disease. The current study explores whether cyberbullying incidents increased among adolescents overall—and Asian American youth…

Journal of Early Adolescence

Bias-Based Cyberbullying Among Early Adolescents: The Role of Cognitive and Affective Empathy

Bias-based cyberbullying involves repeated hurtful actions online that devalue or harass one’s peers specific to an identity-based characteristic. Cyberbullying in general has received increased scholarly scrutiny over the last decade, but the subtype of bias-based cyberbullying has been much less frequently investigated, with no known previous studies involving youth across the United States. The current…

Model Sexting Law

In my last post, I discussed what I learned in reviewing all of the state sexting laws across the U.S. Some states have comprehensive sexting laws while many others—23 to be exact—have no sexting specific law whatsoever. As noted in my post, this is problematic for a number of reasons, including the risk that minors…

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…

2021 Cyberbullying Data

This study surveyed a nationally-representative sample of 2,546 middle and high school students between the ages of 13 and 17 in the United States. Data were collected in April and May of 2021. Click on the thumbnail images to enlarge. Cyberbullying Victimization. We define cyberbullying as: “Cyberbullying is when someone repeatedly and intentionally harasses, mistreats,…

Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L: When Can a School Discipline a Student for Online Speech?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in a panel to discuss the pending Supreme Court case Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. Other panelists were Dr. Eric Kasper, a Professor of Political Science who teaches constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and who directs the Menard Center for Constitutional Studies, and Darpana…

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…