Summary of Our Cyberbullying Research (2007-2023)
At the Cyberbullying Research Center we have been collecting data from middle and high school students since 2002. We have surveyed more than 35,000 students from middle and high schools from across the United States in sixteen unique projects. The following two charts show the percent of respondents who have experienced cyberbullying at some point […]
2023 Cyberbullying Data
This study surveyed a nationally-representative sample of 5,005 middle and high school students between the ages of 13 and 17 in the United States. Data were collected in May and June of 2023. Click on the thumbnail images to enlarge. Cyberbullying Victimization. We define cyberbullying as: “Cyberbullying is when someone repeatedly and intentionally harasses, mistreats, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Cyberbullying Among Asian American Youth Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Last year I posted preliminary results of our inquiry into whether cyberbullying had increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that it had in fact increased, though not to the extent that some had predicted. Today I can share that additional findings from this research have just been published in the Journal of School Health. […]
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 […]