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If you work in the youth safety space, you know that certain initiatives (such as resilience building) have focused on targets of bullying and cyberbullying. Other programming has concentrated attention on aggressors – to the kids who harass, humiliate, and threaten other youth offline and online. Here, restorative practices and social emotional learning (anger management,…
“You should jump off a roof and kill yourself.” “You’re pathetic and don’t deserve to be alive.” “If U don’t kill yourself tonight, I’ll do it for you.” Each of these comments was recently posted to a popular anonymous social media app. I was contacted by a police officer who was investigating the incident. We…
In our school assemblies, Sameer and I regularly talk with students about using social media safely and responsibly. One part of this discussion focuses on encouraging youth to only connect on private accounts with those they know and trust. In general, if a Facebook user, for example, has their privacy settings configured in a way…
This past summer, I served as a Fulbright Specialist at the Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC) at Dublin City University (DCU) in Dublin, Ireland. It was an amazing experience. I just wanted to take a few minutes to share what it involved, who I spent time with, and how it made an impact – not just short-term,…
Sarahah is the latest social media application to create a stir. Simply put, Sarahah is a one-way, many-to-one anonymous messaging system that allows people to send messages to a particular person without the recipient knowing who sent them. These can come from people you know (from those in your phone contacts, for example) or from…
Last week, I attended a workshop at Harvard entitled “Harmful Speech Online: At the Intersection of Algorithms and Human Behavior.” Sponsored and organized by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, its goal was to “broadly explore harmful speech…
Ten years ago, computer scientists would contact our Center and ask if we could give them thousands of examples of cyberbullying content – which they wanted to comb through to look for trends and patterns in how harm was inflicted. Nowadays, they don’t ask for data because it’s widely available for them to web scrape…
Last week I received an email from Martin Cocker, a friend and colleague who runs the Netsafe organization in New Zealand. Netsafe is a one-stop shop for all things related to online safety. If you are a New Zealander who is being mistreated online, or work with someone who is, Netsafe can help. Last year…
When you sign up for the “Blue Whale Challenge,” you are given a series of tasks over a period of 50 days. One day you could be told to watch a scary movie at 4:20am, while on another you might be required to cut yourself. On the 50th day though, to win the challenge, you…
The inaugural World Anti-Bullying Forum was held in Sweden this week (where the cherry blossoms were blooming!), and I had the honor of representing the Cyberbullying Research Center and the International Bullying Prevention Association (IBPA) in attending. I am doing some work at Dublin City University for the first half of this summer, and so…
Over six years ago I wrote a post where I offered advice to teens who receive a sext. “Sexting” is when someone takes a naked or semi-naked (explicit) picture or video of themselves, usually using their phone, and sends it to someone else. We are mostly concerned with these behaviors as they occur among middle…
We have talked a lot about resilience over the last year, and have shared some practical ways to cultivate that ability. Today, I want to provide some additional tangible strategies to help you further. I have previously discussed that it is critical for kids to be placed intentionally in situations where they can discover their…
Resilience online is built in the same way as resilience offline. We must provide opportunities for youth to face social and relational problems head on, and to recognize their own strength, agency, and power to overcome them – do so within an environment of supportive resources (so they know you and I have their back!).…
League of Legends (or League for short) is the most popular multiplayer online game in the world, and takes place in a 3-D battle arena setting involving role-playing and real-time strategy elements into its live environment. Players in League (also known as “summoners”) are matched up with others depending on their skill and game level…
A couple weeks ago, I attended Facebook’s annual Global Safety Network Summit in Washington, DC, to hang out with colleagues and long-time friends, and to make some new connections as well. Facebook first discussed the new safety initiatives they are implementing such as their outstanding new suicide prevention tools in Live and Messenger (check them…
As regular followers of this blog know, Sameer and I recently collected data from over 5,500 middle and high school students from across the United States. We asked 12 to 17 year-olds to tell us about their experiences with a variety of online problems, including sexting. I thought it would be useful to share some…
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is a large-scale data collection effort led by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. A nationally-representative sample of approximately 90,000 households is selected, and a survey is administered face-to-face or via telephone twice a year for three years to 160,000 persons within those households who…
Over five years ago I saw a statistic that jumped out at me: “160,000 students stay home from school every day because of bullying.” This is a compelling and frankly unacceptable number. I thought about including it in a book that Sameer and I were working on at the time. As I started to dig…
We’ve all heard the “sticks and stones” adage while growing up, and the reality is that words – whether expressed online or in person – can hurt. Sometimes very deeply. But do they always? And do they have to? That is, do I have any say in the matter or am I completely at the…
Here at the Cyberbullying Research Center, we use data to better understand what teens are thinking, doing, and experiencing at school and online. We promote evidence-based and research-inspired policies, procedures, and programming. And given the frequently-changing nature of technology use and misuse, we find it necessary to collect our own data on a regular basis…
It is easy for many adults – whether educators or parents – to focus on the negatives of social media in the lives of teens today. This is understandable, because they are the ones who have to deal with the fallout when adolescents make mistakes online (cyberbullying incidents, sexting cases, electronic dating violence, digital reputation…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social communication and often is marked by restricted interests, repetitive behaviors, and focus and sensory issues. ASD is diagnosed along a continuum from Level 1 (which can be equated to traditional conceptions of Asperger’s Syndrome – a term largely outdated), to Level 2 (where the…
American presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton recently remarked that: “Parents and teachers are already worrying about what they call the ‘Trump Effect.’ They report that bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims and immigrants.” (August 25th, 2016, Reno, NV) But is this accurate? It came out of…
I get a chance to meet and hang out with a lot of youth as I help schools educate their faculty, staff, and students about promoting positive teen technology use. With some, I’ve developed a friendship and have met their parent(s), and it has provided me a sounding board off which I can bounce ideas,…