Cyberbullying Bill in Illinois
Illinois is seemingly about to pass a law to criminalize any instances of cyberbullying that involve a direct threat to another person. Penalties include up to one year in jail for the first instance of harassing someone online, with repeat offenses leading to up to three years imprisonment. Oddly, the bill only mentions web sites […]
Dr. Patchin Presenting on Cyberbullying in Phoenix, AZ
I will be at the Jostens Renaissance National Conference presenting on cyberbullying on July 12th, 2008. More details about the conference can be found here. I’ll post more information in the near future!
Putting the Final Touches on Our Cyberbullying Book
As regular readers know, we have been working on our cyberbullying book for well over a year. It is currently in the copy-editing phase and is still on track for publication in August. It goes without saying that we are extremely excited about this. It is a culmination of over five years of research. We […]
Indictments Filed in Megan Meier Case
Indictments were filed yesterday in the Megan Meier case. For those of you unfamiliar with the case, you can read the story here. In short, Megan Meier was the 13-year-old from Missouri who committed suicide after being cyberbullied on MySpace. To make matters worse, the offender was a fictitious 16-year-old boy who was created by […]
Teenage Girls, Physical Violence, YouTube, and our Culture
So…I’m sure by now you all have heard the news story and seen the attendant video of the cheerleader in Lakeland, Florida who was lured into a “friend’s” home and then severely beaten by that friend and other cheerleaders. All of this for basically talking smack over MySpace (cyberbullying?) about those friends. So what we […]
Personal Information of Adolescents on the Internet: A Quantitative Content Analysis of MySpace
Many youth have recently embraced online social networking sites such as MySpace (myspace.com) to meet their social and relational needs. While manifold benefits stem from participating in such web-based environments, the popular media has been quick to demonize MySpace even though an exponentially small proportion of its users have been victimized due to irresponsible or […]
Cyberbullying: An Exploratory Analysis of Factors Related to Offending and Victimization
Victimization on the Internet through what has been termed cyberbullying has attracted increased attention from scholars and practitioners. Defined as “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the medium of electronic text” (Patchin & Hinduja, 2006), this negative experience not only undermines a youth’s freedom to use and explore valuable online resources, but also can result […]
2007 Cyberbullying Data
This study surveyed a random sample of 1,963 middle school students (mostly aged 11-14) from a large school district in the southern United States. Data were collected in in the spring of 2007 from 30 different schools. Click on thumbnail images to enlarge. Teen Technology Use. Online games are the most popular activity reported with […]
Bullies Move beyond the Schoolyard: A Preliminary Look at Cyberbullying
Bullying in a school setting is an important social concern that has received increased scholarly attention in recent years. Specifically, its causes and effects have been under investigation by a number of researchers in the social and behavioral sciences. A new permutation of bullying, however, has recently arisen and become common: tech-savvy students are turning […]
