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…
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…
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…
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…
Background Research on digital self-harm – the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself – is still in its infancy. Yet unexplored is whether digital self-harm is related to suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. Methods In the current study, survey data were collected in 2019 from a national sample of…
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…
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.…
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…
As of July 1, 2022, 23 states in the U.S. do not have laws specific to teen sexting. Our research shows that approximately 14% of middle and high school students have sent explicit images to others, while about 23% have received similar images from others. Likewise, a 2022 meta-analysis of 28 studies published between 2016…
Sameer and I have been interested in digital self-harm for almost a decade now. We first became aware of it when we learned of the suicide of Hannah Smith, a 14-year-old girl from England who ended her own life after being mistreated online. It was ultimately determined that many of the hurtful comments directed to…
At the Cyberbullying Research Center we have been collecting data from middle and high school students since 2002. We have surveyed more than 30,000 students from middle and high schools from across the United States in fourteen unique projects. The following two charts show the percent of respondents who have experienced cyberbullying at some point…
Seventeen-year-old Jordan DeMay seemed to have it all going for him: he was handsome, athletic, and was finishing his senior year at Marquette Senior High School in Marquette, Michigan. He was Homecoming King. When a pretty girl he didn’t know messaged him on Instagram and asked to exchange intimate images, he was skeptical. After a…
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 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…
New research shows that school bullying dropped dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic while cyberbullying remained stable. One of the questions we have been asked most often over the last 18 months is whether bullying has gotten better or worse since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Early on, there was a concern that cyberbullying incidents…
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…
I was sitting in the bleachers of my son’s recent hockey practice when another parent came up to me and sheepishly asked: “Does your son have a phone?” “Funny you should ask,” I replied. Coincidentally enough, we gave our son his first full-functioning phone that very day. I don’t think this particular parent knows what…
The U.S. Supreme Court has just released a highly anticipated opinion in the case of a Pennsylvania high school cheerleader who was suspended from the team for profanity about the team that was posted to Snapchat on the weekend. (If you are new to Mahanoy v. B.L., see my previous posts here and here.) We…
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,…
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…
B.L. was a promising cheerleader at Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. She had been involved in the sport since elementary school, and as a freshman participated on the junior varsity team. Going into her sophomore year, she was hoping to make the varsity squad. To her disappointment, she was once again placed…
I pick my son up from school most days, and from his first day of kindergarten I got into the habit of routinely asking him two specific questions: 1) “How was your day?” and 2) “Was there any bullying?” I’d ask the latter question with a conspiratorial raise of my brow—as if asking him if…
This month we have been highlighting results from our recent national survey of tweens, conducted with our friends at Cartoon Network. In this post, I want to focus on what we learned about the devices tweens have and the apps and games they use. Technology access and use by children is of interest to many,…
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…