By Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin This cyberbullying guide is a nine-page summary – filled with as much useful information as possible – to equip educators, parents, and other youth-serving adults to spot cyberbullying, respond to it appropriately and meaningfully, and to prevent its future occurrence among those they care for. If you only…
By Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin In an effort to better prevent and respond to bullying and cyberbullying, schools are recognizing a need to focus on positive youth development. One often-neglected developmental construct in this rubric is resilience, which can help students successfully respond to the variety of challenges they face. Enhancing this internal…
By Justin W. Patchin and Sameer Hinduja Purpose: Despite increased media and scholarly attention to digital forms of aggression directed toward adolescents by their peers (e.g., cyberbullying), very little research has explored digital aggression directed toward oneself. “Digital self-harm” is the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself. The current…
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,…
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…
With presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently pledging at a town hall meeting that she would do whatever she could to end revenge porn (and cyberbullying [call us, Hillary, we can help! Donald, you too!]), I thought it was time to take a closer look at the phenomenon. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about…
When I think of the term “sextortion” I think of an offense marked by deceit, manipulation, and the callous exploitation of human vulnerability. I think of trust being violated, and I think of absolute heartbreak from the fallout. Finally, I think of wounds from which it seems very hard to recover. It also reminds me…
By Justin W. Patchin and Sameer Hinduja Despite a significant amount of attention by both the academic community and society at large, there continues to exist much confusion about both the conceptual and operational definitions of cyberbullying (and by implication, bullying in general). The trouble with this lack of clarity is that it leads to…
Researchers at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) just published a paper in the journal Psychology of Violence that explores the question of whether technology “amplifies” the harm for youth who are harassed. Anecdotally, we have heard this to be the case from many youth over the years:…
The Obama administration arguably declared war on bullying in the fall of 2010 when it convened the first federally-supported Bullying Prevention Summit. In 2011, stopbullying.gov was launched. That same year, I attended a conference hosted by President Obama at the White House, where he said: “If there is one goal of this conference, it is…
Our primary mission at the Cyberbullying Research Center is to translate the research we and others do into something that is meaningful and interpretable to teens, parents, educators, and others dedicated to preventing and responding more effectively to cyberbullying. When we first launched this website (10 years ago!), there wasn’t much research being done, and…
Despite a recent headline announcing the opposite, most teens do not sext. Kelly Wallace wrote an article for CNN back in November which was updated and reposted last week. Most of the content of the article is accurate, and I certainly appreciate that she referred to published research and interviewed people who know what they…
By Justin W. Patchin and Sameer Hinduja Use this Cyberbullying Research activity to help your students better understand the nature and extent of cyberbullying behaviors. Patchin, J. W. & Hinduja, S. (2014). A Leader’s Guide to Words Wound. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing. Download PDF You can also download the complete (and free!) Leader’s Guide…
Last week I presented at the International Bullying Prevention Association’s annual conference in San Diego, CA. This was the second time that I have participated in this event, and both experiences were enjoyable and educational. The attendees (over 700 strong this year) are generally very interested in the work that we are doing at the…
In my last post on this blog I wrote about the difficulty in determining when mean behavior crosses the line and becomes bullying behavior. I also discussed the challenge for researchers in trying to quantify the difference. In this post, I’d like to talk about why it is important to establish such a line. As…
University of New Hampshire sociology professor David Finkelhor recently wrote a short, but thought-provoking, commentary that questions the motives of journalists and scholars in their efforts to explain the nature and extent of risks associated with teen technology use. The impetus for this invited-editorial was an article written by Sonia Livingstone and Peter Smith published…
It’s been nearly three years since I posted a summary of the current state of cyberbullying research on this blog. That post was inspired by my concern that no researchers were included on a panel that testified to the Committee on Education and Labor’s Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities on the topic of how…
By Russell A. Sabella, Justin W. Patchin, and Sameer Hinduja Bullying has long been a concern of youth advocates (e.g., educators, counselors, researchers, policy makers). Recently, cyberbullying (bullying perpetrated through online technology) has dominated the headlines as a major current-day adolescent challenge. This article reviews available empirical research to examine the accuracy of commonly-perpetuated claims…
By Justin W. Patchin and Sameer Hinduja Research into the causes and consequences of cyberbullying among adolescents has exploded in the past 5 years [1]. However, much of the literature is largely descriptive in nature and/or suffers from methodological limitations associated with accessing and studying young people who are engaged in constantly changing high-tech behaviors.…
The title of Deborah Temkin’s recent Huffington Post article is a simple request: “Stop saying bullying causes suicide.” Her plea is understandable and justified. Sameer and I also cringe when we read the ubiquitous headlines espousing the conventional wisdom proclaiming that “bullying causes suicide.” But what does the research actually say about the nature of this…
Since our book School Climate 2.0: Preventing Cyberbullying and Sexting One Classroom at a Time was published last year, the response has been amazing. Many educators have come up to us at events around the country to tell us how much they really appreciate the research-based information and strategies that they can put to use…
If you pay attention to the news reports of cyberbullying incidents (like we do), you would probably think that these inappropriate online behaviors are happening at epidemic levels. When we first started studying cyberbullying over a decade ago, Sameer and I would literally print out any news article we saw that talked about a cyberbullying…
By Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin Cyberbullying is a problem affecting a meaningful proportion of youth as they embrace online communication and interaction. Research has identified a number of real-world negative ramifications for both the targets and those who bully. During adolescence, many behavioral choices are influenced and conditioned by the role of major…