Sexting picture a bit clearer, maybe brighter

We all just got a little clearer picture on teen sexting (nude or sexy texting), and it's not quite as dark as previously painted. The first known (and widely cited) survey on the subject, by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, found that 20% of teens have "sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves." The latest figure - in a new survey by Harris Interactive for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Cox Communications - is very close to that (19%), but it's cumulative; there's a breakdown of who's involved in sexting and how. As ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid reports in CNET, "the data from the Cox survey showed that, while 20% of teens "have engaged in sexting ... only 9% 'sent a sext,' ... 17% received one and 3% forwarded a 'sext'.... That 9% number is too high but it's less than half the 20% figure commonly used. And 90% of the kids who sent 'sexts' said that nothing bad happened, even though 74% of the kids agreed that sexting is 'wrong'. Twenty-three percent felt that it's OK if both parties are OK with it and only 3% said 'there is nothing wrong with it'." It's when "something bad happens" that we worry, because of the child-porn-related legal implications (see "Tips to Prevent Sexting" for more on that), but sexting can also turn into cyberbullying. And here's what's concerning about there: According to Clemson University psychology professor Robin Kowalski, kids don't want to tell parents or other adults about digital harassment because they fear 1) they'll be further victimized if the bully gets into trouble and retaliates and 2) their parents will remove their computers or cellphones - social lifelines - in an effort to protect them.

Disturbing teen behavior not prosecuted: Good

Sixth graders posting a "cartoon" on YouTube about "six ways to kill" another girl in their peer group. The girl's mother was understandably horrified and called the police. The police later said they won't pursue charges, the Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune reports, because they don't believe malice or hate were involved, also telling the News Tribune that "the girls called the victim’s mother crying and upset after the incident." Wise police. Technically, this could be considered criminal behavior, but this is also adolescence. The executive part of the brain that understands the implications of actions isn't developed until people's early-to-mid-20s. Kids "just don't think" a lot of the time, so parents need to be engaged and asking questions about why, for example, a child's spending so much time in an animation program - what kind of animation is she creating? Lines of communication must be kept open so kids are less reluctant to answer those questions, which can help prevent cruel behavior from happening. From the coverage I've seen of this incident, both law enforcement and school handled it as a teachable moment for the benefit of individuals and community - to their credit, if that was the case. I love how middle-school principal Nancy Flynn in Minnesota handled a cyberbullying incident, turning it into a teachable moment for all the girls involved (note, too, the helpful, informed comments below her account). See also "The Net effect" - how the Internet affects age-old adolescent behavior. [Thanks to Anne Bubnic in California for pointing Flynn's post out.]

Debating cyberbullying legislation

It's called the Cyberbullying Prevention Act of 2009, but some are calling it the "Censorship Act of 2009." The bill, introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), "is designed to prevent cyberbullying, making it punishable by a fine and up to two years in prison," FOXNews.com reports. One critic of the bill, UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh, said that - if the law were passed - he could go to jail for what he's blogged about the law! And my co-director at ConnectSafely, Larry Magid, told Fox News that "you can't legislate against meanness." MSNBC columnist Helen A.S. Popkin suggests that, with laws like this, legislators seem to be clear on principles but not on where the Internet comes in, as a reflection of humanity good and bad. "You know how shutting down the 'erotic services' section on Craigslist won't stop sex workers, or eliminate their higher probability of becoming crime victims by the marginalized nature of the trade? Similarly, outlawing meanness on the Internet won’t prevent hectors from preying on the weak on the Internet or turn jerks into saints in any aspect of their lives." And here's what really resonates with me: "Unfortunately, sensation rallies a mob more efficiently than adequate research and dissemination of critical information: how to recognize dangerous behavior, mental illness and suicide risk in teenagers, no matter the stressor," Popkin writes. Representative Sanchez defended her bill in the Huffington Post.

Harassed online, teen star bites back

Miley Cyrus, aka Disney's Hannah Montana, has tweeted against cyberbullies. She "posted an angry tirade on her Twitter page following a flurry of criticism about her weight after she joked about her thighs jiggling," Reuters reports. She told her harassers to stop calling her fat, writing, "I don't even like the word. Those remarks that you hateful people use are fighting words, the ones that scar people and cause them to do damage to themselves or others." She suggested that people who spend a lot of time gossiping should "read their Bible" and articles about how cyberbullying affects people. Reuters adds that, over the past 10 years, 37 US states have adopted laws requiring schools to implement anti-bullying policies.

Anti-gay bullying most pervasive

This month two 11-year-olds, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Mass., and Jaheem Herrera of DeKalb County, Ga. - neither of whom identified as gay - committed suicide after anti-gay harassment and bullying at school. "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers," the Salt Lake Tribune reports, adding that "two of the top three reasons secondary school students said their peers were most often bullied at school were actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender expression." The Tribune was citing research by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network and Harris Interactive. New York Times columnist Charles Blow cites even more data in an eloquent column, "Two Little Boys," where he considers why bullying of any kind, including what Carl and Jaheem endured, is so devastating for kids: "Children can’t see their budding lives through the long lens of wisdom - the wisdom that benefits from years passed, hurdles overcome, strength summoned, resilience realized, selves discovered and accepted, hearts broken but mended and love experienced in the fullest, truest majesty that the word deserves. For them, the weight of ridicule and ostracism can feel crushing and without the possibility of reprieve." GLSEN's latest study, its just-released "Harsh Realities," can be found here.

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 5: Cold shoulders

By Sharon Duke Estroff

I’m not even a week into my undercover expedition and I’m already racking up penguin pals like Pokemon cards. No wonder Club Penguin's signature tagline is "Waddle around and make new friends"! That said, not all the birds I’ve met in this hopping virtual world are amicable types. Here’s what happened when I (ChillyLily) approached a group of cheery looking penguins dancing outside the lighthouse:

Me: Hi I am ChillyLily and I am KEWL

Dancing Penguin 1: R not

Me: Hannah Montana Rules

Dancing Penguin 2: Weirdo

Dancing Penguin 3: We r going to a members only party

Me: Can I come?

Dancing Penguin 1: Ewww no!

Me: PLZ

Dancing Penguin 2: (angry face emoticon)

Me: (sad face emoticon)

Dancing Penguin 3: Go away or I M reporting U

Report me? As in clicking the monitor badge icon on my player card to tell the CP powers that be that I am behaving inappropriately (which wasn’t true at all)? Couldn’t Dancing Penguin 3 just click on the ghost icon and ignore me for a while (meaning none of the messages I send will show up in bubbles on her screen until she decides to reinstate me to her inner circle)? If I get reported, the monitors could silence me. Or worse yet, they could ban me from Club Penguin altogether! And then what good would I be as an undercover penguin? In the name of damage control, I took the hint and slunk away.

Mom Break: Like so many aspects of children’s virtual worlds, I found Club Penguin’s buzzing social scene to be a mixed bag of fun, fascination, and concern.

I’ll start in the Pro column. When we were growing up, kids ran around the neighborhood with their friends until stars filled the sky. But today not so much. (Why? Because oodles of extracurriculars, mounds of homework, a generally anxiety-ridden parental population, and the advent of the formal playdate have rendered such informal socialization among children ancient practice, but that’s a whole different parenting post.) Consequently, many contemporary kids experience unprecedented feelings of isolation, loneliness, and stress. Virtual social networking, when done safely and in moderation, can provide children with a comforting sense of companionship and community – and not just in the digital realm. Many kids I chatted with in my real world focus sessions reported meeting up with their school friends on Club Penguin at night and on weekends. Social networking at a young age (in secure and kid-oriented environments) helps build critical digital literacy in children while giving parents an opportunity to teach their kids appropriate online behavior and safety rules early in the game.

And now for the Cons. Despite the fact that Club Penguin, like many other sites, works overtime to keep the chat civil, believe me, social cruelty is rampant. A virtual playground is, after all, still a playground with all the classic bullying and power plays. But unlike a real-world playground, there are no parents or teachers around to set the mean kids straight. And, in my mind at least, the website monitors don’t count. (Would you trust a babysitter to watch your kids if she was also responsible for watching millions of other kids at the same time? I think not.) In my first five days on Club Penguin, I was called "weirdo" three times, "nerd" four, and hit with numerous mean face emoticons. I was excluded from eight private igloo parties, told to go away six times, and pummeled with more snowballs than I can count. And as for my encounter with those snobby dancing penguins, well, it felt like junior high all over again. Sure the CP filters prevented them from saying anything blatantly inappropriate, but the penguins' cattiness and cruelty come through like a bullhorn.

I managed to snag some screenshots of (what I consider to be) cyberbullying on Club Penguin. As you look at them, try to imagine how you would feel as a little kid sitting alone in front of a computer screen reading such messages.

Note from editor Anne Collier: For more kinds of cyberbullying in kids' virtual worlds, see "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users" that I wrote, based on an interview with Sharon last summer. For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Schools: How to handle group cyberbullying?

I have a question for you, but first here's what it's about: A recent group cyberbullying incident involving two high schools in Palo Alto, Calif., has "sparked intense discussion" among parents, school administrators and general community members "about the proper role of the school district" when cyberbullying involves students but doesn't happen on school grounds," Palo Alto Online reports. School officials called the parents of students known to be involved and took no disciplinary action. Each incident is unique, but digital pile-ons are not unusual, in fact a very similar group cyberbullying story in Oregon arrived in my in-box just a few days ago. In both incidents, an "I Hate____" group in Facebook had been established by the bullies, but that development is often not the beginning of an altercation, and it definitely wasn't in the Oregon case. So even the lack of users' anonymity in Facebook couldn't expose every student involved and doesn't get to the bottom of what happened. In the Oregon case (it's hard to tell from the Palo Alto story), even the target of the hate group apparently wasn't completely the innocent victim. It's important to note, though, that in both cases, Facebook deleted the groups upon notification. This isn't the solution (it doesn't end arguments), but it's an important part of the resolution process.

My question is, what do you think school officials should've done? In California, a new law gives schools authority to suspend or expel students for cyberbullying, but as I read through these cases - saw their complexities and how hard it is for schools to know exactly how the argument started, who started it, how many students are involved, whether the victim was the original instigator, or even whether it was staged for the instigators' instant fame online - I think suspension is like a blunt-instrument approach that of course punishes some involved but discourages students from reporting such cases in the future and doesn't resolve what the argument was about. The schools were right to call parents. But tell me if you agree that the schools could also turn incidents like this into "teachable moments" in the form of school assemblies about all possible implications of taking fights public online. In such assemblies or in digital citizenship instruction, schools might teach students the three basic types of leadership behavior described by Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use: "speaking out against the harm, reporting the harm to an adult who is in a position to intervene, and helping the targeted student." Would appreciate your thoughts - via comments here or in our forum at ConnectSafely.org. Feel free, too, to email them to me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Canadian study: Cyberbullying seen as 'cool'

A recent survey found that 40% of Canadian 9-to-17-year-olds say they've been cyberbullied (43% female, 38% male), nearly 60% said there were no consequences, and "some 60% of the respondents agree people bully because it’s 'cool'," reports the Vancouver Sun, citing the survey from Microsoft Canada and market research firm Youthography. The London (Ont.) Free Press reports that Canadian "parents are more involved than ever with their children's online activities," with 84% of respondents saying they've talked with their parents about Internet dangers. Here's the study's press release. In other findings:

9-to-12-year-old Canadians are online just under two hours a day, on average, compared to three hours a day for teens 13-to-17-year-olds

Girls primarily go online to socialize, with "68% saying that is what they value the Internet for" and the same percentage of boys saying they value the ability to play games.

"Teens are more likely than tweens to use the Internet to escape problems, deal with stress and avoid family problems.

30% have lied about their age on a social networking site, and 15% have pretended to be someone they are not.

15% have had their passwords stolen.

76% are very careful about the personal information they divulge online.

Facebook: 'Facelift,' lawsuit

Seems like every week's a big week for Facebook! This week saw the beginning of functionality changes for users which will "over time enable user 'profiles' to serve more as individual Web pages that could convey messages far beyond the current 5,000-'friend' limit," the San Jose Mercury News reports. The Mercury News said changes will include: users being able to categorize their "friends" into "separate and sometimes overlapping subgroups, such as 'family,' 'close friends' and ''co-workers'," and users able to "more easily post links, photos or videos with their comments into the 'stream' of information to and from the Facebook site [parents, ask your kids to keep you posted on how this works and whether they're paying attention to privacy settings in the midst of this]." Meanwhile, Information Week reports that "a New York teenager has sued the social networking site and some of its users because of a Facebook chat group where she says she was ridiculed and disgraced." In such cases so far, the Communications Decency Act has protected social network sites and other Internet service providers from being held liable for content users post on their sites.

Stark contrast: 2 social-media stories out of Oz

Livewire, a social network site for youth with disabilities and chronic illnesses, just launched in Australia to help them have a more normal sense of friendship (less fixated on their disabilities) than they may be able to have offline, Reuters reports. Aiming to serve the some 450,000 Australians aged 10-21 "currently living with a serious illness, chronic health condition or disability ... Livewire recruits members from referrals through it's parent organization, the Starlight Children's Foundation, and through hospitals that treat disabilities or chronic cases." Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald quotes a Melbourne youth worker as saying cyberbullying in Australia had reached "epidemic proportions." He called on the government to change laws to give police more powers and "said in recent weeks a 17-year-old high school student jumped to his death off the West Gate Bridge after reading death threats online." It's possible we need to focus more on civil behavior and citizenship education offline and early detection online than on crime and prosecution. At least in the US, police have always had the authority to deal with physical threats in any venue.

NJ to address bullying of gay students

The New Jersey Governor's Commission on Bullying will soon be looking into bullying, particularly against gay students, and what schools are doing to stop it, the Daily Record reports. Commission chair Stuart Green "said gay students are perhaps the most vulnerable when it comes to bullying, and that schools have not done enough to address the issue.... School officials have been saying for a couple of years that they have just begun to deal with gay and gender identity issues, long after other diversity issues had been addressed." The commission will consider what educational programs and teacher training are needed and - pointing to the online part of bullying - "whether school officials should do more to punish actions that take place outside of school but have an impact on the classroom, as allowed by state law."

JuicyCampus: Good bye, good riddance

Citing tough economic times as the reason, gossip site JuicyCampus has shut down. "I'm not shedding any tears for [founder Matt Ivester, who made the announcement]," my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid writes at CBSNEWS.com. "What he refers to as 'lighthearted gossip of college life' was, in many situations, vicious innuendos, hateful messages, and downright lies. In covering the site ... I saw postings that went so far as to call someone a willing slut and publish her cell phone number and address," he says. Let's hope a similar cyberbullying opp - the little social-network app Honesty Box - meets a similar fate. If anybody knows of any downside to losing these venues for anonymous comments about peers, pls email anne(at)netfamilynews.org, and I'll consider publishing their points.

Czech government takes on cyberbullying

An online clip of a teacher slapping a student is what sparked a nationwide debate about cyberbullying in the Czech Republic, the BBC reports. "The clip, which appeared on the Internet in June, showed a teacher telling a boy off for having a messy desk and then smacking him when he answered back," according to a Radio Prague report. It's not clear from the BBC piece whether the Czech public felt it was the teacher or the student who posted the clip who was doing the bullying, but the Education Ministry told the BBC that "some Czech children have attempted to blackmail teachers or classmates by posting video clips of them on the Internet." The Ministry has now issued cyberbullying guidelines for teachers that go beyond "simply confiscating mobile phones or banning their use during classes."

Japan's mobile bullying problem

Mobile phone bullying is on the rise in Japan, where some 96% of high school students own mobile phones, and the country's Education Ministry is proposing a nationwide ban on cellphones at school. "Nearly 6,000 incidents of mobile phone-related bullying were reported in schools last year, a rise of more than 1,000 compared with the previous year," The Telegraph reports, citing Japanese government data. "The panel also proposed mobile phone companies install public payphones in schools and introduce function limitations on mobile devices while parents establish domestic rules regulating phone usage." An 18-year-old student in Kobe committed suicide last summer "after classmates posted a nude photo of him on a Web site alongside his name and telephone number before sending emails demanding money," and the governor of Osaka has already banned mobile phones in his prefecture's schools. "Japan has the largest mobile phone market in the world, with annual sales of 50 million phones," according to The Telegraph, which adds that about a third of all elementary school students own mobile phones. As for bullying in general, in the US, every day some 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied, The Coloradoan reports in "Positive relationships end bullying." In the UK, 48% of 10-to-15-year-olds have been "verbally or physically abused in the last year," The Telegraph reports, citing findings from a survey of 150,000 kids by education watchdog Ofsted. See also USATODAY's "Bullying victimization devastates lives ... until victims find ways to heal."

Missouri's new cyberharassment law

Seven people have been prosecuted under Missouri's new online-harassment law, passed after 13-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide as a result of cyberbullying in 2006. "When a press report in 2007 revealed the role that 47-year-old Lori Drew played in Meier's harassment, local authorities felt pressured to charge Drew with a crime, but could find no law under which to prosecute her. So Missouri lawmakers drafted legislation to outlaw future threats or harassing communication that causes emotional distress," Wired's Kim Zetter reports, adding that, under this law, either misdemeanor or felony charges can apply. The seven current cases involve everything from harassing messages to physical threats, most involved text messages via cellphone, and - interestingly - none of the cases Wired cites involved social networking. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch cites the view of author and cyberbullying expert Justin Patchin that laws like Missouri's "fail to deter such behavior by young people because most don't understand what cyberbullying is." They may be more effective, he added, in "protecting children targeted by adults," but the Post-Dispatch says he's "skeptical that such laws will be upheld in courts." At least 18 states now have laws targeting Internet harassment and cyberstalking, according to the Post-Dispatch. Here's the ReadWriteWeb blog on all this with a post about current efforts to reduce or end online anonymity.

Ireland: Guide for parents on mobile bullying

Ireland's cellphone companies - Vodafone, O2, Meteor, and 3 - got together and created a parents' guide to protecting kids from phone-based bullying, the Irish Times reports. Available on the companies' Web sites and at retail stores, it explains the mobile operators' service called "dual access," with which "parents can check the numbers their child has been calling and texting, and keep an eye on the amount of money spent. Parents can also ask operators to block certain services." To see what mobile carriers on this side of the Atlantic are doing for parents, see this item last May. Also: ConnectSafely.org's "Tips to help stop cyberbullying," "Cellphone safety tips," "Mobile parenting," and - for more on the discussion in Ireland - "Cellphone cos. & bullying." [Thanks to the EC's QuickLinks for pointing the above story out.]

Korean crackdown on malicious Net use

South Korea has cracked down on malicious Internet use, Agence France Presse reports. "South Korean police have rounded up more than 2,000 people for spreading malicious rumours on the Internet during a month-long crackdown sparked by an actress's suicide," AFP reports. Eleven people "have been formally arrested and detained for serious legal breaches." It adds that Korea's National Police Agency's cyber-terror prevention centre is asking prosecutors to charge "another 2,019 with various offences," and the crackdown will continue, AFP adds, referring to the centre's chief investigator. Charges include libel (about 59% of those arrested), breaching laws on contempt, blackmail, and cyberstalking.

Questions raised by Megan Meier case

Although Lori Drew was convicted only on misdemeanor charges last week and though the case may yet be dismissed, the questions it raises are important ones:

Legal

Although what happened between the Meiers and Drews in the St. Louis area in 2006 was about cyberbullying, the case against Drew wasn't, actually. It was about computer fraud. Ms. Drew's involvement in the creation of a fake profile (or real profile of a fictional teen boy character) was called by the prosecutors "unauthorized access" violating federal computer fraud law, the New York Times reports. According to the Washington Post, the case thus "expands the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 as a tool against hackers, to include social networking Web sites." Even so, the Post cites legal experts as saying, this was "the country's first cyberbullying verdict."

The Times reports that MySpace's terms of service require users to be "truthful and accurate" when they sign up for an account, yet a lot of people of all ages all over the Web fictionalize or veil their identities for many reasons - the way authors with pen names have as long as there have been books. So do cops pretending to be 14-year-old girls as they set up stings to catch online predators. In other words, there are both legitimate (including protective) and ill-intentioned reasons to be pseudonymous or anonymous online. Does this case jeopardize legitimate use of anonymity (see also "Fictionalizing their profiles" and "Online anonymity vs. cyberbullying concerns")?

Another question is about those terms of service. Does this case mean social-networking sites must enforce their terms of use? That could be both good and bad. Terms of use could become more of a mutual contract between site and users whereby users (or their parents) might actually have some sort of recourse if terms are violated by bullies. On the downside, rigid enforcement does not always have good results, where human beings (and adolescent behavior) are concerned. This is a good reminder, though, that parents and kids together check site terms of use for what they say about truthfulness. I think it also suggests that social sites consider putting their terms in plain English! But it's concerning if, as the result of this case, violation of terms could be considered criminal behavior. The proverbial jury's still out on that last point.

Bad for case law: "Let's also make one thing very clear," writes social media researcher danah boyd (who lower-cases her name). "This case is NOT TYPICAL [it's extreme and extremely unusual]. Many are clamoring to make laws based on this case and one thing we know is that bad cases make bad case law. Most of the cases focus on the technology rather than the damage of psychological abuse and the misuse of adult power." I agree. This story, if not the case, is not about computers or social networking or solely online behavior; it's about behavior. Which leads to the parenting set of questions....

Parental

The message that parents need to be involved in right ways - as moderators (in every sense of the word) and not accomplices - is only getting stronger. Though this is a tough message for busy parents to hear, we want to be in the mix. Just as we've always needed to be engaged in our teens' offline social lives - because a primary task of adolescent brain development is risk assessment - we need to be involved in their online lives too.

We also don't want our role to be diminished in favor of "protective" law or policy, because we don't want our children's free speech and privacy rights taken away or in any way diminished ostensibly "for their own protection." Engaged parents are vital supporters of their children's rights.

An important aspect of this for parents to keep in mind is that the high visibility of an extreme case and increasing news coverage of cyberbullying in general do not mean bullying online is on the rise or adolescent behavior has changed. This is important to keep in mind about social networking too. Danah boyd makes the point that the Internet probably hasn't increased the amount of bullying; rather, it has made it and all adolescent behavior more visible - certainly, but naturally, with disturbing effect - to adults. "Now adults can see it. Most adults think that this means that the Internet is the culprit, but this logic is flawed and dangerous. Stifling bullying online won't make bullying go away; it'll just send it back underground. The visibility gives us an advantage. If we see it, we can work with it to stop it." Yes!

Potential positive outcome

Peer support and counseling online - by "digital street workers" - is what danah boyd proposes. When she was in college, danah writes, fellow students volunteered as street workers to help at-risk "teens on the street find resources and help. They directed them to psychologists, doctors, and social workers. We need a program like this for the digital streets. We need college-aged young adults to troll the digital world looking out for teens who are in trouble and helping them seek help. We need online counselors who can work with minors to address their behavioral issues without forcing the minor to contend with parents or bureaucracy. We need online social workers that can connect with kids and help them understand their options."

She's talking about kids whose parents simply aren't there - the young people who are at risk online. "They are the kids who are being beaten at home and blog about it. They are the kids who publicly humiliate other kids to get attention. They are the kids who seek sex with strangers as a form of validation. They are the kids who are lonely, suicidal, and self-destructive.... They are calling out for help. Why aren't we listening? And why are we blaming the technology instead?" When we stop doing that, we can really start helping at-risk youth online and increasing online safety.

I propose that all social sites and services employ...

1. "Digital street workers" (older peers/young adults as online community volunteers) and
2. Paid, trained counselors or social workers on their customer-service staffs - in addition to community moderators for socializing by minors.

Your views on any of this would be most welcome - via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, in this blog, or in our ConnectSafely forum. With your permission, I often publish readers' comments for everybody's benefit.

Related links

"The 'MySpace Suicide' Case, Social Networking, and the Law" in Findlaw

My first post on the Megan Meier case, Nov. '07 "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light." See also "Dismissal urged in Megan Meier case."

Key week for bullying awareness

Bullying needs to be detected and addressed early! "By age 24, 60% of identified bullies have a criminal conviction. Young children who were labeled by their peers as bullies required more support from adults, from government agencies, had more court convictions, more alcoholism, more anti-social personality disorders and used more mental health services," according to research by psychology professor Debra Pepler at York University (here's a sample of her work . That's just one of a group of statistics - some disturbing, some calls to action - that Bill Belsey pulled together and distributed to mark this week, Canada's sixth-annual Bullying Awareness Week. A parent and teacher too, Bill is founder of the award-winning Bullying.org and Cyberbullying.ca. Here are some other eye-opening numbers from Dr. Pepler and other Canadian researchers (for more info, see BullyingAwarenessWeek.org):

Bullying occurs in school playgrounds every 7 minutes and once every 25 minutes in class.

85% of bullying episodes occur in the context of a peer group.

Bullying usually stops in less than 10 seconds when peers intervene on behalf of the victim.

25% of kids children say teachers intervene in bullying situations, while 70% of
teachers believe they always intervene.

Bullying is reduced in schools where principals are committed to reducing bullying.

See also the McGill News on an experience that brought cyberbullying home - literally - for cyberbullying expert and McGill University professor Shaheen Shariff; Tips to help stop cyberbullying; "Cyberbullying better defined"; "Online harassment: Not telling parents"; and "Teaching students to help stop cyberbullying."

Teaching students to help stop cyberbullying

A conference on cyberbullying last week in Montpelier drew some 300 middle and high school students from all over Vermont, the Rutland Herald reported. Judging by the reporting, it was very effective - a research-based approach that encouraged empathy and gave young people information they could act on (along those lines, see our new "Tips to Help Stop Cyberbullying" at ConnectSafely.org).

The keynote was given by John Halligan, father of Ryan Halligan, who was 13 when he killed himself after being bullied online. Telling Ryan's story "made the students think twice about online communications," according to the Herald. Halligan told the students that he believed it's up to them, not adults, to stop cyberbullying. [Here's an interview PBS's "Frontline" producers did with Mr. Halligan for its "Growing Up Online" documentary, which you and your kids can watch in full by clicking in the upper-right-hand corner of its home page.]

Phil Fogelman, an education director at the Anti-Defamation League, which sponsored the conference, also spoke. He explained that the social and emotional impact of cyberbullying on people can be "devastating." "The students gathered in small groups for two hours of workshops, identifying the most common forms of cyberbullying, which include sharing secret or embarrassing information about someone, sending cruel messages, spreading rumors online and posing as someone else," according to the Burlington Free Press.

Speakers taught students how to recognize and address cyberbullying when it happens. The Herald reported that "most of the students said that when they encountered cyberbullying they tried to remain uninvolved. Instructors said it was important not to participate, but also said being a bystander is not enough. Students were urged to report cases of cyberbullying to an adult."

Related links

Further info for everybody: Cyberbullying & Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress, by Nancy Willard, and Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying, by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin

For teens: Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope, by teen authors Olivia Gardner, Emily Buder, and Sarah Buder

For schools: Cyber Bullying: A Prevention Curriculum for Grades 3-5 and Cyber Bullying: A prevention Curriculum for Grades 6-12, by Susan Limber, Robin Kowalski, and Patricia Agatston

"Cyberbullying better defined" in NetFamilyNews, 9/19/08

"Online harassment: Not telling parents" in NetFamilyNews, 10/6/08

"Tips to Help Stop Cyberbullying" from NFN's sister site, ConnectSafely.org

Is anger rife online or...

...in "real life," or both? CNN focuses on the Net, saying that "though there are any number of bloggers and commenters who attempt to keep their postings and responses on a civil level, all too often interactive Web sites descend into ad hominem attacks, insults and plain old name-calling. Indeed, there are even whole sites devoted to venting, such as justrage.com ... and mybiggestcomplaint.com." It's exactly what digital-citizenship instruction needs to address, but remember too that disagreement can be respectful and anger ok if not hurtful. Civility, certainly, but also anger management, empathy, critical thinking, and thicker-skin development are all good topics for digital-citizenship discussion. Here's CNN's sidebar on anger in Second Life.

'The parents' fault. Not.'

Those are the words of tech educator Will Richardson, who in his blog tells of a conversation with a high school principal. Richardson had said in his presentation that no one was teaching young people how to use social-network sites well. So the principal told Richardson he was teaching them - when he hauls them into his office, shows them the nasty stuff he'd found on their profiles, and watches the "genuine astonishment" on their faces that he'd found their profiles. Clearly that cluelessness was their parents' fault, the principal indicated. Richardson thought not, but the solution is not the one-shot "parent awareness night" or "some type of scary Internet predator presentation by a state policeman." He continued: "For the life of me, I can't understand what is so hard about opening up the first and second and third grade curriculum and finding ways to integrate these skills and literacies in a systemic way. If you want kids to be educated about these tools and environments, then maybe we should, um, educate them." Hear, hear! But here's a literacy we can integrate into our kids' lives too: life literacy, learning how to function in community (online as well as offline), learning treat others as we'd like: Tech-etiquette basics like "no texting or talking during dinner." [See also "Cellphone etiquette."]

M.U.S.I.C. in class

With the US election tomorrow, it seems a fitting time to read Thomas Paine and Jimmy Cliff at the top of a middle-school assignment about social justice and perseverance, followed by 7th-graders' interpretations. New York City teacher John Chase's 8th-graders' even more powerful responses to songs about social responsibility and empathy indicates how much the assignment resonated with them (put this into an anti-cyberbullying lesson, teachers and advocates!). Music - or rather M.U.S.I.C. (Musicians United for Songs in the Classroom), a nonprofit organization Chase formed - is literally bringing history to life, or rather to his students' everyday lives and connections with the people in them (including their teachers!). Here's the Paine-Cliff assignment in Chase's own words in his MySpace blog, where so many musicians and students are: "Last month 7th-grade students studied the American Revolution and learned about the 'power of the pen' and Thomas Paine's essay, 'The American Crisis.' We also listened to and discussed Jimmy Cliff's song, 'The Harder They Come.' I then asked my students to practice being Paine or Cliff, and compose a personal mission statement, poem, or lyric to inspire and motivate people to 'fight on' in our times." Here's the story on Chase and the M.U.S.I.C. program, as well as the past summer's project, with comments from musicians involved. In his bio Chase quotes Maya Angelou as saying, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Online harassment: From one who's been there

Lisa's experience of "cyberbullying" is probably the most common - some anonymous person(s) who made up "random screennames" and sent her IMs saying "stupid things" like "you're stupid" or "you're fat," she told a reporter from the Digital Natives project at Harvard University's Berkman Center. Though it probably wasn't cyberbullying as defined by researchers (see this), it certainly made her wonder: "Are my friends really my friends?" It was "kind of an uncomfortable ordeal because I never knew who it was in the end, but it wasn't as bad as being made fun of in real life could've been," Lisa, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, student from New Jersey, said in an audio interview.

That last point gets at the distinction between online harassment and cyberbullying, which has a more hurtful connection to school life. In real life, Lisa says, "it's hurtful because it's direct and it's personal and you’re standing there and it hurts. If it's on the Internet, you can easily disregard it because it's not personal, they don't know who your are, and they can't offend you because they're not talking about you - they're just trying to give a comeback. So if it's on the Internet, it's kind of like you have more power, you're in much more control, it's kind of like a big shield."

There you have possible talking (or coaching) points for parents whose kids are being harassed online. As Lisa points out, these experiences are indeed a big deal when you're in the middle of them, and they do raise all kinds of unsettling questions about who your friends are, but if they're anonymous meanness, a parent might say: You can choose to make that same anonymity that they're hiding behind your "shield," as Lisa put it. They have no idea how their words affected you, so you're in control - you can choose to let the words roll off and not react. Because reaction is very likely exactly what the harasser wants, and you can decide whether s/he gets it." The uncertainty that goes with incidents like this is rarely unique to the incident; it's more like a constant of pre-adolescent life that spikes each time such an incident happens. As tweens learn social norms, figure out and create their school's social scene, and explore identity, they're also learning how to cope with the uncertainty and other challenges associated with the wider circle of relationships in adult life.

I hope parents will actually get the chance to have this conversation with their children, since kids so rarely report online harassment - only 10% of 12-to-17-year-olds tell parents or other adults, according to research from UCLA (see this post), which also found that the harassment Lisa described was the most frequently occurring kind among the young people in its survey. Harsher cyberbullying may call for outside professional help.

A much tougher story that does fit the emerging definition of cyberbullying was told in the Long Beach (Calif.) Herald this week. For details on the slightly one-sided telling of the story (because the alleged bully's family declined to comment), please read the article. But the outcomes so far indicate a lot of maturity on the part of the girl, "Mary" (15), who experienced the online abuse. After having to leave her school (she is still being home-schooled a year later), "Mary said the experience made her stronger, but only after a period of depression." She told the Herald that, even though people tell her bullying is "part of life," she feels that it is not and should not be. She also told the paper that she could handle having her experience told publicly if it could help somebody else.

Solution creation

One of the conditions of cyberspace that enables harassment and bullying is disinhibition, a word psychologists use to describe what happens when we lose the face-to-face part of communication. It's like suddenly, in this environment, we're more robots than humans. So it seems to me we'll be able to mitigate cyberbullying when we begin to reduce the disinhibition effect and increase the empathy factor - when it begins to sink in with children (everybody, really) that behind those text messages, avatars, profile comments, and IMs are real people with real feelings.

Cyber Bullying: A Prevention Curriculum for Grades 6-12 takes disinhibition head on - with collaborative learning that teaches empathy. The curriculum (book plus printable materials on a CD) - by educators Susan Limber, PhD, Robin Kowalski, PhD, and Patricia W. Agatston, PhD - is designed for schools, but parents and community-service programs will find it helpful too. At the core of the curriculum are true bullying stories like some that have appeared in NetFamilyNews in the past few years. The titles are pretty self-explanatory: "Boy Found in Locker after Three Hours"; "Being Excluded Online" (peers defriend a girls and stop IM-ing and texting); "Hip Hop Dancing Girl" (who unthinkingly videotaped herself and later found a peer posted the video online for all to see); "Tired of Being Bullied at School, Teen Strikes Back Online" (with a defaming Web site about the bully and faces charges); "Teens Facing Felony Charges for Cyberbullying Revenge" (posting a video of their retaliation beating of the peer on a video-sharing site).

With the curriculum, students lead discussions, role-play, write journal entries about the incidents, design anti-bullying Web sites, etc. There's a complete training module for teachers. For school administrators and resource officers, the curriculum goes beyond education to resources for dealing with this on-campus, off-campus challenge. Supporting materials include boilerplate letters to parents, incident reports, acceptable-use policies; guidelines for choosing students leaders; and legal information, including forms for evidence-gathering.

The curriculum is based on the holistic ("whole school") Olweus Bullying Prevention Program that seeks to involve all stakeholders (at school, home, and in the community) not only in reducing and preventing bullying but also improving eliminating in preventing and reducing bullying problem but also improving "peer relations at school."

Related links

So international. If anyone had any doubts that bullying is a universal problem, here's news from Bangalore, India: The Daily News & Analysis reports that a three-year study involving 1,200 students and 600 teachers, 59% of boys and 65% of girls (ages 14-18) said bullying was occurring at their school.

Toward "social intelligence": earlier NetFamilyNews coverage here and in an item on "stalking" as a form of social intelligence-gathering.

"'Cyberbullying' better defined": Researchers cite three factors that escalate it beyond the online harassment Lisa experienced (above): repeated aggression; power imbalance; ties to "real life" (school life, for the most part).

Site for anonymous bullying reporting

Given the recent UCLA report on young people's reticence in reporting cyberbullying (see this), this is an interesting concept: a Web site that allows students to report said anonymously. So far the Utah-Based site, SchoolTipline.com, is being used by "six Utah schools and 48 schools in other states," the Salt Lake Tribune reports. The only concern is that the site could also be abused. Given also what we know of how kids have been known to abuse abuse-reporting in kid virtual worlds (see "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users"). An apparent protection against this possibility is that the tips go right to administrators of the schools that have signed on. One administrator told the Tribune she's received 20 reports so far this year, one of which was false. "Often [the administrators] respond to the anonymous student online and ask for more details. Sometimes they can persuade the student to come forward and work with them. At the very least, if the student doesn't want to be identified, school officials can question the alleged bully or keep an eye on the situation." Hmm, the thought occurs: what impact would age verification of minors have on this process?

How kids become bully victims: Very early signs

A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry offers clues to how children become targets of bullying, Newsweek reports. The first key finding was that bully victims in grade school are more likely to have been aggressive (e.g., "smashing a toy when someone takes their ball away") very early in life, as young as 17 months, in fact. "That may sound counterintuitive, but it's not surprising to experts in the field, who have known for some time that there's a link between being aggressive and being tormented." When an angry child acts out his or her frustrations, peers know there are buttons to push. Another predictor: when these very small children take their anger out on other children. Two other risk factors Newsweek mentions are "harsh or reactive parenting" and "lower income families." Here's the study.

40,000+ students polled on their Net use

The Rochester Institute of Technology refers to "a startling new reality of cybercrime," but it's much more about child and adolescent behavior than crime and it's not a new reality. What's unprecedented about this study is the size of its sample, 40,000+ children and teens, the way it breaks bullying and other online behaviors down by grade level, and the detail and number of its questions. Though it's a local and not a nationwide sample (14 school districts in the Rochester area), it's one that can be tracked from year to year - what researchers call a longitudinal study, which has obvious value. The RIT study also offers insights into parents' and educators' understanding of the situation.

Even the study's lead author, RIT Graduate Program Coordinator Sam McQuade, acknowledges this is not new behavior: "What has traditionally happened on the playground has now moved into cyberspace," he says in the study's press release. "The major difference is that children have a sense that they’re anonymous and invincible online. Therefore, they seem to lash out in ways that they may not in person."

Last week I heard Dr. McQuade present his research to the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard (see my post), unfortunately referring to children more in the language of law enforcement than of child development. But the study does, importantly, help advance society's thinking about children's online safety, which to date has focused almost entirely on youth victimization. With both positive and negative outcomes, young people are participants, if not shapers, of the social Web and therefore key stakeholders in their own well-being and in keeping the use of social media safe and civil.

Here's a sampler of some key findings....

Grades K-1: "48% of K-1 students interact with people on Web sites" as opposed to various other devices and "48% reported viewing online content that made them feel uncomfortable," with 72% reporting that to a grownup.

Grades 2-3: "Cyberbullying and victimization begins as early as the 2nd grade for some children" (McQuade told the Task Force that, at this grade level, "cyberbullying" means "someone was mean to me or I was mean to someone"). [See my post "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users."].

Grades 4-6: 27% are "completely unsupervised when they go online," and 7% reported being the victim of cyberbullying/threats," most of those "by one of their peers."

Grades 7-9: "59% of cyberbullying victims said their perpetrators were a friend they know in person.... The four types of middle-school online offenders are generalists, pirates, academic cheaters, and deceiving bullies."

Grades 10-12: These students spend 15+ hours a week online; "16% have experienced cyberbullying, 17% have been embarrassed online, and 15% have been harassed or stalked online." The "types of offenders in this age group," McQuade told us, are "hackers, fraudsters, pornographers, deceiving bullies, data snoops, pirates, academic cheaters - the majority of kids are engaged in one of these forms of offending."

"I don't know how you can get out in front of this thing," Dr. McQuade told the Task Force, referring to the behaviors the study exposed (and "you" presumably being parents and educators). But I believe parents and educators have the knowledge and tools to help mitigate online peer harassment. How can I say that? Because this is about behavior, not technology. Together and separately at home and school, parents and educators have been dealing with behavior as long as there have been children! We have also known enough to bring in additional expertise when it's needed - that of counselors, social workers, lawyers, and sometimes law enforcement. These days we sometimes need the help of school IT people, tech coordinators, computer forensics specialists, and social-networking customer service people too. But the expertise of caring, engaged parents and educators cannot be discounted, remains at the heart of the solution, and - as we think all this through together with our children and apply what we already know - can go a long way toward getting "getting out in front" of unruly online behavior as much as the offline kind.

"Today’s children are most frequently preying on each other online - and their parents rarely have any idea it's happening," McQuade said. "Preying" is a strong word, but the study's findings could be broken down this way: 1) that online bullying and harassment is the risk that affects a great many more youth than online predation does (it's a little dated, but see "Predators vs. cyberbullies"), 2) that the young people it affects are mainstream youth - anybody's kid - not the more marginalized youth who, research shows, are victimized by "predators" (see "Profile of a teen online victim"), and 3) that the line between the roles of bully and victim is very fine and crossed all the time (see the FL case in which the victim, who was unarguably bullied, had been harassing the kids who bullied her in IM). Sometimes bullying does turn into a crime, but the harassment often starts well before it has escalated into one; an incident is very rarely as clear-cut as the headlines make it out to be.

Related links

Toward defining "cyberbullying" - followed by a response to and from author and researcher, Prof. Justin Patchin

The RIT study's executive summary and the press release with a link to the full report in pdf format (alternate URL and pdf doc)

Earlier in NetFamilyNews: "Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together" and many other NetFamilyNews posts on cyberbullying among these search results.

Online harassment or bullying?

Does online harassment become cyberbullying when it's repeated aggressive behavior? Is it bullying only if it's related to a child's experience at school? Are insults posted in social-network profiles harassment while posting of compromising photos of a peer constitutes bullying? These are tough questions still being debated. What does seem to be emerging is the sense that "bullying" is more severe (causing more emotional distress and potentially involving physical threats) than "harassment." Ultimately, the definition may be as much about the victim as the perpetrator - how capable he or she is of shrugging off the mean behavior. Justin Patchin, co-author of the new book Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard, emailed me about my post on defining cyberbullying last week. He posted a thoughtful response in his own blog at Cyberbullying.us, suggesting that online harassment may by default included the repetition factor just because mean posts and images can be re-posted and shared on the Web and mobile devices. About linking online bullying to offline life, "we agree that those incidents that have proven most hurtful typically involve a personal relationship (the target knows the offender in real life)," Professor Patchin writes. "That doesn’t mean, however, that we should simply disregard those behaviors that are carried out among “strangers” online. They too can result in harm." Absolutely! I also think technology can be used not only to express an existing power imbalance between harasser and victim but also to help *create* the power imbalance a would-be bully wants to set up. While we're on the subject, check out this Las Vegas Sun editorial about how some Nevada schools are intelligently working with student activists to address online harassment in the context of violence and intimidation and to teach conflict resolution. The Sun's editors commend Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE), a national organization that has nearly two dozen chapters in Nevada (here's more on SAVE).

'Cyberbullying' better defined

This is important, people, because we've heard the one-third-of-US-teens-have-been-cyberbullied figure a lot (I've shared it too), and it's not in the best interests of online youth for the now-subsiding predator panic to suddenly now turn into a cyberbully panic. It's not that the one-third figure, arrived at by two highly credible sources (Pew Internet & American Life and Profs. Patchin and Hinduja) is wrong, of course; it's that "cyberbullying" really needs to be more clearly defined. Are all those kids actually bullied?

"In many cases, the concept of 'bullying' or 'cyber-bullying' may be inappropriate for online interpersonal offenses," write researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) in the Journal of Adolescent Health. "We suggest using 'online harassment,' with disclaimers that it does not constitute bullying unless it is part of or related to offline bullying. This would include incidents perpetrated by peers that occur entirely online, but arise from school-related events or relationships and have school-related consequences for targets."

To understand more about online harassment and to what extent it could be bullying, the study's authors - Janis Wolak, Kimberly Mitchell, and David Finkelhor - looked at "the characteristics of harassed youth, online harassment incidents, and distressing online harassment," based on whether the harasser was someone known in real life or online only.

The authors found that "9% of youth were harassed online in the past year," 43% of them by known peers and 57% by people they met online and did not know in person.... Most online harassment incidents did not appear to meet the standard definition of bullying used in school-based research and requiring aggression, repetition, and power imbalance."

So, note those key characteristics of bullying to look for:

1) related to "real life"
2) not just aggression, but repeated aggression
3) a power imbalance.

"Only 25% of incidents by known peers and 21% by online-only contacts involved both repeated incidents and either distress to targets or adult intervention," the authors found. Just looking at that first number, that's 25% of the 43% of the 9% - a pretty small number of actual cyberbullying victims.

So when we see data showing large numbers of such victims, it's good to be aware that they can include random and even mild incidents of harassment that don't really cause stress - and could just be someone in a bad mood one afternoon who feels like acting out. "Cyberbullying" deserves to be taken with a grain of salt. In any case, teaching young people citizenship of both the real-life and digital sorts will help mitigate any behavior that falls into that large category.

[The CACRC article was published a year ago last August - apologies that I missed this one, probably because of overseas travel at that time.]

Related links

From Forbes, the very well reported article, "How to Stop Cyber-Bullying"

"Why kids don't tell on cyberbullies"

"Cyberbullying grows bigger and meaner with photos, video"

"Online bullying should be a criminal offense," Canadian teachers say (I wonder if their US counterparts agree)

"Internet program teaches harms of bullying to elementary students" in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Standing up to cyberbullies," Q&A with Mike Donlin, who "manages federal technology programs and cyberbullying education and prevention efforts" for the Seattle public schools

In School CIO magazine, a three-part series and primer on online harassment with the very unfortunate headline of "Terror in the Classroom" - Parts One, Two, and Three.

"P2P healing in cyberbullying case"

Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope, by teen authors Olivia Gardner, Emily Buder, and Sarah Buder

Cyberbully.org and the book Cyberbullying & Cyber Threats from the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use

CyberbullyHelp.com from Patricia Agatston, Susan Limber, and Robin Kowalski, the authors of Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age

Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard, a new book from Profs. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin.

How to protect from defamation?

That's an unanswered question where the social Web's concerned. Social sites seem to have more protection from US law than their users have right now. A little-known section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) is what protects - rightfully, I think - Internet service providers and social-networking sites from liability for what's posted by users of their services, reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in his column in the San Jose Mercury News. It's a little like the way the phone company is not held liable for the nasty things people sometimes say to each other when using its service. [What's different about the social Web, of course - and what makes it much harder for victims or parents not to blame the service provider - is that what users say to or post about each other is public, so the damage can be amplified, reposted, searched for, and perpetuated.]

Anyway, US law so far protects the service provider. The only thing that protects users from each other is the customer service departments of the more responsible social sites, or service providers. For example, MySpace takes down harassing imposter profiles, once it goes through its own internal process of proving that someone's being victimized by someone else who set up a profile impersonating the victim. (It's not always easy to prove what people claim is happening online - sometimes people will say they're being victimized to get someone else kicked off the site, or kids pose as parents to get other kids' profiles taken down.) Not even sites' Terms of Service really protect users, according to a researcher I spoke with recently, who said that sites' Terms are more guidelines than enforced rules. In any case, whether or not Terms of Use are enforced depends on the site.

There are sites like JuicyCampus.com, where victimized users are just out of luck. Larry writes that, when he visited JuicyCampus recently, "the second most prominent post [he found on the home page] read: "paul [his last name, deleted here, was in the post] is a _______ piece of ____ [expletives deleted] who is a closet gay that gets drunk and fools around with other guys secretly." As mean and possibly libelous as that is, Larry writes, the site "can't be touched.... In theory, 'paul' could try to take action against the person who wrote the statement," but JuicyCampus would have to help him find who made the statement. US federal privacy law (different from CDA) prevents any site from revealing the identity of one user to another without a subpoena or other court-issued document. JuicyCampus, though, actually helps people who make such statements stay anonymous, Larry reports, by advising them to use a search engine to find services "that offer free IP-cloaking" (hiding the IP number associated with their computers for anyone trying to find them). Besides, speech like that seen in JuicyCampus, may be hateful and defaming, but it isn't necessarily criminal - it's more along the lines of cyberbullying (not that this doesn't make it less damaging).

With no real recourse, what are victims and their advocates (e.g., parents) to do? This is a discussion that the industry, consumer advocates, and legal experts need to have (or continue!). But all that's at the macro, societal, level. Obviously, there's much that can be done at the micro – household – level, as well as at school. We all need to be helping young people with whom we have influence to think just as critically, alertly, and ethically about how they behave online as they do offline. Nothing should ever take ethics out of the mix. The relatively lawless social Web demands ethical behavior more than anywhere.

The message to our children is: Anonymity and disinhibition change nothing. Not being able to see the other person you're talking to or about is all the more reason to think of that person as a fellow human being. I've never liked the term "cyberspace" because "cyber" suggests robotics. The participatory Web is not alien territory populated by robots – it's another place where human beings hang out.

Your thoughts on this are most welcome – post them in our ConnectSafely.org forum or email them to me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

CA's cyberbullying legislation

A California law that's "close to passing" would spell suspension or expulsion for students who bully online or on phones, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The measure by Assemblyman Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, passed the Senate Monday on a 21-11 vote. It goes back to the Assembly for consideration of Senate amendments and will be sent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger if passed." The page in the Chronicle links to the full text of the legislation.

P2P healing in cyberbullying case

We hear so much in the news about teen meanness and harassment toward each other online that it's quite amazing to find a national story about kindness. In the case of Olivia Gardner, the kindness came from two sisters in a nearby town, Sarah and Emily Buder in Mill Valley, Calif., who read in the newspaper about how Olivia was being bullied and wanted to help, they say in their MySpace video. The in-school bullying of Olivia started, unbelievably, after she had an epileptic seizure. "Then someone started an 'Olivia Haters Club' on the Internet with pornographic emails," MSNBC reports. Her mother couldn't help - she told MSNBC that no words of comfort helped. It was thousands of letters, starting with messages of support from Sarah and Emily, that started Olivia on the road back from near-daily suicidal thoughts to healing. The letters came from all over the countries, not only with messages of love and support but also stories of how the writers too had been bullied. The result of all this is a new book from HarperCollins, Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope, by Olivia Gardner, Emily Buder, and Sarah Buder. [For experts' advice on the online kind of bullying, see the books Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age, by Patricia Agatston, Susan Limber, and Robin Kowalski, Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats, by Nancy Willard, and a book coming out this month: Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying, by Profs. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin.]

Middle school cyberbullying a federal case

A mean conversation about a middle-school peer is videotaped off school grounds, is uploaded to YouTube, and suddenly their school's administrators have to figure out what to do about it. "Citing 'cyberbullying' concerns, school administrators [in Beverly Hills] suspended for two days the student who uploaded the video, without disciplining others in the recording. The suspended student sued the school district in June in federal district court in Los Angeles, saying her free-speech rights were violated," the Los Angeles Times reports. The Times cites one legal expert as saying that, unless the school shows evidence of "substantial disruption of school business" by the video it doesn't have much of a case.

Another kind of filtering needed too

Apple retail stores aren't the only places employing tech "geniuses." Libraries are too. The Internet has turned out to be a "major tool" not only for patrons but librarians as well, saving space, making library resources accessible at home, and bringing more patrons to the library, Michigan's Saginaw News reports. Research that the Saginaw News cites indicates patrons are figuring out that librarians are better than anyone at information filtering. "With their training, librarians are more adept than the average citizen at using search engines to locate and decipher reliable data. [Librarian Gail] Parsons notes her experience helps her discern valid sources and recognize biases." The need for those filtering skills has never been greater - not only for being good scholars and media consumers but also for safe, productive use of technology (phones, the Web, virtual worlds, videogames, media players, etc.). Parents and educators, too, play vital roles in this filtering education. Media-literacy teaching at home and school can be aimed at critical thinking not only about 1) incoming information but also about 2) incoming communication - from everybody, friends or not. It also needs to move beyond what's coming in to include 3) outgoing behavior and communication from a child, via text, images, voice, and video (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). About Nos. 2 and 3, children can be taught to ask themselves questions like: What's this person really saying to me - is this a form of manipulation? Am I being fair to this person if I IM this about him - would I want him to say this about me? Should I send a photo around with this person in it if I don't have her permission? Will posting this video of me possibly embarrass me in the future if I can't take it down and someone could copy and repost it anytime?

Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users

It stands to reason that bullying happens in kids' virtual worlds (e.g., Club Penguin, Webkinz, Neopets, Nicktropolis, etc.), because, well, it happens in school, instant messaging, and social-networking sites. But I hadn't learned how it happened until Sharon Duke Estroff called me about it. The Atlanta-based parenting columnist, former elementary school teacher, kids' pop culture expert, author, and mother of four spent a couple of weeks in Club Penguin to learn what her eight-year-old son might experience there. She didn't like everything she saw.

Having occasionally watched my own son waddle around and play games in Club Penguin and thought it was pretty cute, I asked her why. Sharon - who will tell you that she's definitely not an overreactor where parenting's concerned - proceeded to tell me what she learned about digital pre-adolescent behavior in CP (and I have no doubt similar experiences are to be had in every other virtual playground on the Web).

Not that her CP time was all bad, of course, but there were some "Lord of the Flies moments" just like in real-life elementary school, and I thought you'd like to know what the virtual versions look like - techniques kids have developed for beating the system so they can move all that social behavior at school, good and bad, online. Simply put, they're "workarounds"- some but not all about meanness or bullying. So I boiled the behavioral parts of what Sharon told me down to a list of eight (note how sophisticated these workarounds' young creators are):

1. Beating the language filter. Putting consecutive words in separate message "bubbles," spaces between letters, creative capitalization and punctuation, etc. - whatever it takes to say what they like, including mean stuff and invitations to "visit me alone in my igloo."

2. Code lingo. Not just POS ("parent over shoulder") or ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing"), but text-formatting tricks that get around safe-language rules: e.g., if language filters don't allow numbers, kids share their ages by expressing them in dots. For example, they ask, "How many dots are you?" and get back: "I'm ........."

3. ID theft, kid-style. One of the cardinal rules of online safety is never to share your password because best friends sometimes become non-friends and can impersonate and embarrass you. Password-sharing, however, is rampant in kid virtual worlds - a popular way of offering and accepting best-friend status. It becomes a problem when your "best friend" logs on as your avatar and makes it break the rules so you get kicked out.

4. Stealing virtual possessions. Kids also use peers' passwords to steal their virtual clothes, furniture, and other in-world possessions so the victims have to start over or walk around as naked avatars and so the thief, succumbing to some sort of pre-adolescent digital version of "keeping up with the Joneses," can add to his/her in-world prestige (as well as the real-world kind - because, Sharon said, a lot of penguins know each other as humans at school too).

5. Abusing abuse reporting. The digital version of tattling: being mean by reporting avatars just so they get privileges taken away. "Kids can report other kids for all kinds of vague reasons, but they don't have to give a reason - all they have to do is press a button on the player card and the complaint goes straight to the monitor," Sharon said.

6. Using safety features to bully. Using blocking, ghosting, ignoring, and other in-world user-security tools to ostracize a kid or make it clear he's not a member of "the club" - whatever the club-of-the-moment is.

7. Digital "Spin the Bottle." Those pre-teen games for exploring dating and sexuality have moved into cyberspace. Kids manipulate their avatars and a virtual world's systems to create opportunities to explore virtual sexuality too. An example in Club Penguin: "Spin the Fish," only the fish doesn't spin; "you have to pretend it does," according to young CP lifestyles blogger Imatweetybrd, whose blog Sharon found. "You either say 'I'll spin!' or someone will tell you to spin. Then, most likely, you are just going to say 'spin,' then 'it landed on [the penguin's name that you like most]. At that point, you go up the person and say 'mwah.' Then your turn's over. Your penguin might like you back and ask you out or maybe you want to ask him out, then you guys can leave the game or whatever."

8. Kid avatars have cheats too. Just because the person behind the avatar is only nine years old certainly does not mean s/he's any less savvy about how to find cheats to beat the game and make coins or points a lot faster in order to have a bigger place of residence and more clothes, puffles, and furniture. The kid just types the name of an in-world game into a Web search engine and turns up hundreds of tips, or "cheats," as they're called - situation normal in the world of videogames (clearly also for people of younger and younger age, we now see).

My takeaways

First it should be acknowledged that there are plenty of positive and just plain fun things about Club Penguin too (check out its kid philanthropy feature). It's possible the average child user (probably 7-10 - not teen hackers like Mike 92 in Related links below) could experience or use one or two of the above workarounds, but not likely all, unless he or she is looking for trouble, feeling mean, or really into power in a social sort of way. Putting all the workarounds together here is designed only to help parents ask intelligent questions.

My 11-year-old was an avid CP user for a few weeks last year, but he never noticed any of the above except a few cheats (penguins a little too good at some games) and occasional meanness - trigger-happy abuse reporters or safety-feature abusers - and none of it ruined his fun in CP, but CP also wasn't the all of his entertainment or social life (balanced lives do help us not take certain things too seriously). The workarounds only confirm for me that, wherever kids are online, alertness and critical thinking are needed on the part of children as well as parents. Club Penguin and other kid virtual worlds are not babysitters! But they are great social-networking training for both participants and parents. They offer many teachable moments for learning all kinds of things: e.g., how to treat others online as well as offline, how to be a good citizen and friend, how to detect social and commercial manipulation, how to deal with peer pressure and group think, and even how to be a leader.

Readers, we'd love to hear about your children's virtual-world experiences in the ConnectSafely.org forum. Email's ok too, via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Visual aids: "Club Penguin Robbery" video at YouTube in which director/producer/penguin Mike 92 robs Club Penguin's bank and gets his just desserts (here's his cheats site). I'm guessing Mike is a teenager who uses CP as a hacking and video-producing creative outlet (hacking isn't necessarily illegal or malicious). Another, more bird's-eye view of cheating the systems is "How to move peoples stuff on Club Penguin."

Numbers: "As of last month [4/08], more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," the New York Times reports. "Many sites such as Empire of Sports, Planet Cazmo and Xivio are aimed at so-called tweens, ages 8 to 12.... This year, more than 12 million children nationwide under the age of 18 will visit at least one of these sites, and that number will grow to 20 million by 2011," the Times adds, citing eMarketer research.

For some nearly original digital kid anthropology research, surf around the Club Penguin Coolers blog.

Sharon Duke Estroff's bio Web site

Good for dinnertable discussion: "How social influencing works"

ConnectSafely.org's Safety Tips & Advice page

Griefers: Gamer worlds' bullies

Griefers aren't new to gaming communities, but they're apparently becoming a fixture in multiplayer online games too - games such as World of Warcraft, RuneScape and Everquest, Reuters reports. "Unlike traditional Internet bullies who work through instant messages and cell phones, griefers lurk on online multi-player videogames, harassing their victim by bullying, tormenting or thwarting other players in the game," according to Reuters. For help on how to deal with this, see "10 Tips for Dealing with Griefers" at Microsoft.com, "Dealing with Griefers in Second Life" at MindSigh.com, and in a World of Warcraft forum, "Nazsh's Guide to Dealing with Griefers." See also "Support for young videogamers."

2 virtual worlds: NECC and Second Life!

Last week I went to my first NECC, the giant National Educational Computing Conference, this year in sticky, toasty San Antonio. We heard at the keynote (appropriately given by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds) that some 18,000, mostly tech educators, were there. I was there to speak on a panel about online safety presented by the California Technology Assistance Project, which had Larry Magid and me speak about our book, MySpace Unraveled, a couple of years ago (more about CTAP in a moment) and to steep myself in tech education for a few days.

NECC was both inspiring and overwhelming. But overwhelming was good because, instead of trying to figure out what on earth to sample of the hundreds of workshops and presentations, I decided to go deep. I went to everything I could find about virtual worlds Second Life and Teen Second Life (besides my online-safety meetings). I'd long wanted to learn more about SL and virtual worlds in general, and what better way?

Which takes me to the inspiring part: what tech educators are doing in Teen Second Life (parents, you've got to see this stuff!). I attended presentations by two rockstars of the ed tech world....

Peggy Sheehy of Suffern Middle School in the New York area and creator of Ramapo Islands, I believe the very first real-life school in Teen SL (here's a video intro to what's happening at Ramapo, including the students' views, in the blog of another genius tech educator and Second Life resident, Kevin Jarrett), and if you prefer text to video, here's a transcript in Sheehy's blog of a mock trial based on Of Mice and Men staged by Suffern students (or rather their avatars) in Teen Second Life. Ramapo is now six islands in Teen SL, used by 1,000 students and 35 teachers.

Westley Field from Sydney, Australia, founder of the very international Skoolaborate.com and Skoolaborate Island in Teen SL (to see what's going on there, check out the first video on this page). So far this new project has 10 schools in 4 countries collaborating.

Just a few positives I witnessed and heard about in my NECC brushes with education in Second Life (watch this space for more on all this): a girl who never participated in class blossoming in virtual-world classes and then later in real life; the same for a boy whose mother wrote a profound thank you note to his teacher; students in multiple countries learning what species are endangered in others and together creating virtual spaces for them with the kind of environments in which they can thrive; students thinking critically together about body image and developing more healthy views of said by creating different avatars representing their evolving views; an entire class reading all of Of Mice and Men, not just the Cliff Notes, so they could play judges, DAs, prosecutors, witnesses, court reporters, jury members, etc. in the mock trial; students who don't want to miss any of it logging in from home when they're sick.

The amazing CTAP

I'm referring specifically to Region IV of a statewide project to help California's educators integrate technology into learning but also deal with students' extracurricular use of tech! I definitely have a bias because, through my friend, ed-tech eyes 'n' ears, and CTAP staffer Anne Bubnic, I have learned a great deal about both technology and education! You'll see at a glance on this CTAP4 page how much they're doing for California educators just in the area of cyber safety, which CTAP intelligently defines as "the safe and responsible use of the Internet and all information and communication technology devices, including mobile phones, digital cameras, and webcams."

This one region of a state project has a huge sphere of influence. Its funding is for assisting California schools, but the Web has a way of ignoring borders and the Web-wide, worldwide resources Anne has pulled together in Region 4's site are valuable to educators at least nationwide. In addition to the site it continuously updates, CTAP also trains teachers, administrators, school safety people, etc. in person and via videoconferencing. Obviously this second part of its work isn't as visible to all, so I'm going to zoom in on that training in a feature very soon.

Why all this about tech education in NetFamilyNews? Parents' certainly aren't the only shoulders on which society places responsibility for young people's constructive use of technology! Most of the negative stuff involving youth on the social Web is not criminal, so law enforcement (where people so often turn) usually can't help. Very often, then, the focus shifts to school policy and discipline. Yet, a lot of the imposter profiles, defaming blog posts, and general online or phone harassment that disrupts learning at school originates at home or somewhere else off school grounds. So it can really help parents to know what teachers and administrators are dealing with where student behavior's concerned, so the two parties can collaborate - with each other as well as the student(s) involved, hopefully - in solving tech-related problems that come up (see also "Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together"). Problems involving the participatory Web require participatory solutions!

Related links

Peggy Sheehy's Suffern Middle School in Second Life

Westley Field's Skoolaborate

Kevin Jarrett's The Story of My Second Life

The official California Technology Assistance Project Web site's page about all the CTAP regions and their projects and Region 4's specifically (I'd like to know what other states have along the lines of CTAP - email me, people! - via anne@netfamilynews.org).

What makes good digital citizens?

The answer at Digizen.org points to the next phase, I think, of all our efforts in online safety: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy - using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same." That helps me think about how to teach children accountability for their behavior online. If they begin to see online environments as communities they're helping to shape so that they have a stake in appearance, atmosphere, and outcomes of activity within them, they'll simply act more accountably. Maybe disinhibition and anonymity become less problematic when users are citizens as much as socializers. Digizen.org, a report from UK-based Childnet International, looks at social networking with this potential in mind. The report examines the risks but also how the social Web is "being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and colleges." The site defines social networking and links to a pdf comparison chart of seven social network sites. An equally important section of the Digizen.org site addresses cyberbullying, with advice on how to "embed anti-bullying work in schools" and some powerful video teaching tools.

1 in 5 Oz youth cyberbullied

Twenty-two percent of Australian youth have been harassed or bullied online, according to Australia's annually Youth Poll. Even so, "the internet plays a critical role in the lives of 15-to-20-year-olds, with 64% having a social network site, The Age cites the survey as finding. The 22% cyberbullying figure compares to about 33% in the US (for more US data, see "Cyberbullying: Clarity needed"). Not unlike in the US, probably, "body image was a major concern to 54 percent of the [Australian] youths surveyed, 46 percent of whom knew someone who had committed suicide or tried to do so."

Toward solving 'cyberbullying': Editorial

Is the following what your teenager would think of as "cyberbullying"?: "Caustic comments, once passed around class as folded notes, are now immortalized on semi-public Web pages, where they can be viewed by thousands. Students are called fat, their sexuality is questioned and their fashion choices critiqued, often in language not fit to print in a family newspaper," the Washington Post reports, citing a number of specific such incidents in Washington-area schools. Educators, online-safety advocates, and many other adults often use "cyberbullying" as a blanket term for all that and more, basically any sort of harassment online. When some friends recently used the term in a conversation with their teenager, the basic response went something like: "Huh? What does this have to do with me? There's no lack of civility at our school." And yet just this year a teacher at that school was "trashed" by students in a social site. It just could be that "cyberbullying" is pretty meaningless to teens. They're familiar with the full range of behaviors but not this new blanket word whose use may actually undermine parents' and other adults' efforts to engage them in conversations aimed at helping kids think about these behaviors.

One Post source suggested that parents occasionally ask their kids if there was "any bullying on Facebook today?" Maybe it'd be better either to read up on some of the specific online behaviors and incidents in the news and talk about those, using them as "teachable moments" they can relate to. Or just ask questions about their school day - the kinds of questions our parents asked us. Then we can ask if they've noticed those things going on with their friends (or them) on MySpace or Facebook and how they'd handle it.

The Post reports that one principal "identified MySpace as the possible source of a conflict" that got physical at school and in a local mall. MySpace wasn't the source; its role was more like that of the school or the mall, the place where the behavior occurs. When we're talking with our children, it'd be helpful to understand this, too. Yes, their MySpace use can help expose their attitudes and behaviors to a lot more peers simultaneously and that certainly is a problem, but MySpace, Facebook, etc. are not the source of their behavior. Social sites are no more responsible for mean gossip or bullying than a locker room is.

Parenting young people who see little distinction between online and offline will get more effective when we stop blaming the places where antisocial behavior occurs (because we're better informed than that) and start asking relevant questions based on their own social experiences on the Net and everywhere else. When we can communicate in language they can relate to, sending the clear message that they are accountable for their social behavior online as much as offline, we'll move much more quickly toward solving the cyberbullying problem.

'Honesty Box' encouraging cyberbullying?

You've probably seen mentions of JuicyCampus.com, which has gotten some national attention. I've also blogged about "Honesty Box," which - as a widget social networkers can put on their profiles - is in effect a mini JuicyCampus (see this about the latter). These are phenomena of the participatory Web, on which too many people have a distorted sense of their free-speech rights that goes something like "I can say anything nasty I want about anybody (which is not what the First Amendment is about) because I'm anonymous (which they aren't, truly). Having said that, no social site or anything on the user-driven Web is all good or all bad, but some sites and services - such as JuicyCampus and Honesty Box - do seem to be more negative than neutral, more conducive to the darkside of human nature. The ReallyWorried blog is campaigning to get Facebook to delete the Honesty Box widget from its lineup of these little software applications. Three interesting points are made among the comments underneath the blogger's post: 1) Honesty Box is an opt-in widget users can choose not to have on their profiles (and can unsubscribe if they do and change their minds); 2) that may be true about unsubscribing, but the widgetmakers make it hard to unsubscribe; and 3) Facebook "should do everything in its power" to be a safe site for all. The Honesty Box application is not going to help him achieve this." So, my readers, what do you think? Email me your thoughts at anne@netfamilynews.org, or post them at the ConnectSafely forum for the benefit of all. Thanks!

Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together

Maybe it's obvious, but for anyone who's not sure the line between school grounds and what happens at home should be crossed, here's the view of a UK researcher who has been following the rise of cyberbullying closely:

"We know from research that bullying puts the emotional wellbeing and educational achievement of pupils at risk and has a significant and lasting negative impact upon children’s lives. In addition, it impacts on truancy, exclusions, participation in further or higher education and the incidence of self-harm and suicide," writes Dr. Denise Carter at the University of Hull in TeachingExpertise.com.

Why a home-school joint effort? Because this problem is not about technology or even behavior and discipline alone. One of Dr. Carter's findings in a survey she conducted was young people's "lack of life experience to deal with these issues on an emotional, psychological and social level." Young people gain life experience wherever they are - at home, at school, and everywhere in between - and adults in these learning environments know that there is no cookie-cutter way all children develop their street smarts or life literacy.

We know, too, that removing risk is not the solution to cyberbullying. It's teaching youth to "anticipate, recognize, and deal with risks as and when they arise," Carter writes. She also refers to their need to develop emotional resilience, as in helping them internalize that "this is not the end of the world," "I won't let this get to me," "I don't need to react," "there is more to me and my life than these people and what they're doing." These very basic concepts I'm tossing out as suggestions are mine, not Dr. Carter's - she may not agree - but they do illustrate her point that because life literacy is the solution, both problem and solution obliterate any boundary between home and school and deeply affect academic learning and success.

I'd add one more essential element: teaching citizenship, or social behavior. Our consumers or students of anti-cyberbullying education are not just potential victims or potential bullies (one can turn into the other in a matter of seconds on the Net); they're participants. In effect, they're stakeholders in their own well-being and education as well as their peers'; aggressive behavior hurts them as well as others because it can come right back at them and then create a downward spiral within the peer group and beyond (see also this article in the Archive of Pediatrics). So the cyberbullying curriculum necessarily includes life literacy and citizenship. For a lighter but thoughtful take on cybercitizenship ed, see Vanessa Van Petten's "13 holy cybercitizen laws." [Thanks to California tech educator Anne Bubnic for pointing Dr. Carter's article out.]

Related links

"Another Teen Beating Videotape, This One in Indiana"

"Police think Indiana teen beating inspired by Lakeland [Fla.] case"

Tennessee fight video: "Two Southwind Middle School girls were suspended Monday after their locker room fight was posted on the Internet," reports the Commercial Appeal in the Memphis area.

"Video Beating Stokes Debate Over Fame, Violence" in TechNewsWorld.com.

Kids posing online as pedophiles

This is an important heads-up if parents are worried about predators contacting their children online. The "predators" could be other kids playing pranks or being cyberbullies, because anybody can pose as just about anybody else online. Apparently that's happening in southwestern England, where police are saying "children as young as 10 may be posing as predatory paedophiles" on social-networking sites "to frighten boys and girls they have fallen out with," The Guardian reports. It adds that "as many as nine youngsters" were targeted in this way in Bebo and MSN. The police "initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children" (see "How to recognize grooming") but "a member of the public has come forward and told them that youngsters are trying to settle playground disputes by posing as a paedophile to frighten their rivals." For examples of more "conventional" cyberbullying, see this story in the Flint (Mich.) Journal.

UK government's guidelines for social sites

As I mentioned last week, two milestone documents out of the UK have just been released, one a 200-page report requested by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and called "The Byron Review," and the other a set of guidelines for social-networking-service best practices issued by the Home Office itself . Both have worldwide relevance not just because they're about a worldwide medium that's universally popular with youth but also one that allows for ever increasing interaction, social action, and collaborative media-producing and -sharing on an international level. I took a look at the Byron report last week. This week:

UK Home Office's guidance for social-networking sites

The guidelines are surprisingly digestible for a document coming from a government. The actual "Recommendations for Good Practice" are only about eight pages long (see p. 24), and they also come in convenient checklist form (p. 60). The whole report can be downloaded here.

1. Positives

Congrats in order. Everyone involved in these guidelines should be congratulated for the milestone the document represents. Consensus-building on this subject among commercial services, government agencies, child-online-safety advocates, and law enforcement in a medium still so little understood - the social Web - has proven to be difficult in my own country.

Based on solid research. For a practical understanding of a teen's-eye-view of Net use, don't miss "Children's Use of the Internet," p. 14, based on the research of Sonia Livingstone and colleagues (she is a social psychology professor at the London School of Economics & Political Science). Showing the difficulty of reaching child-online-safety consensus, she writes that "views on young people's development are often polarised." On the one hand, "children are seen as vulnerable, undergoing a crucial but fragile process of cognitive and social development to which technology poses a risk by introducing potential harms into the social conditions for development and necessitating, in turn, a protectionist regulatory environment." The other view holds that "children are competent and creative agents in their own right, whose ‘media-savvy’ skills tend to be underestimated by the adults around them, with the consequence that society may fail to provide a sufficiently rich environment for them." I agree with her that "finding a position that recognises both characteristics is important." [See also "Children and the Internet," Appendix B, p. 46, which is just over 4 pages in length, and all the great footnotes and appendix material referring to great work from many researchers.]

Something for everybody. The full document covers a lot of ground for audiences with all degrees of understanding - from defining social networking to considering why it's popular with youth to covering online bullying, self-harm, sexual exploitation, Webcams, and where criminal law comes in.

"Disinhibition" understood. Guideline 9.4 reflects what we know of this online condition that allows "space" between bully and victim as a contributing factor to cyberbullying. It suggests that sites inform users that they are not as anonymous as they may think and employ IP address and identifying technology to track users. I'd go further and recommend that sites explain to users in their online-safety pages, in as much detail as feasible (without giving information away to malicious hackers), how their real-life identities can be found. It's the kind of meaty information that's meaningful to adolescents and shows respect for their intelligence. [To great effect, a school in Philadelphia brought in a computer-forensics police officer to demonstrate the lack of real anonymity to an entire student body.]

Practical. The guidance reflects an understanding that a narrow focus on social networking is impractical as young people's self-expression and socializing flow freely from offline to online and back and among multiple devices that can increasingly be used anywhere.

Not just social networking. In spotlighting chatrooms and Webcams as trouble spots, the guidance reflects the understanding that young people's socializing flows freely from device to device and between various technologies - as both technology and kids develop - and social sites aren't the only place where socializing happens for good or bad. For example, this significant finding about Webcams: "Recent research conducted in Holland by the My Child Online Foundation in 2006, involving 10,900 participants between the ages of 13 and 19, reveals that 47% of girls who responded to the survey, said they had received unwanted requests to do something sexual in front of a webcam – although only 2% actually did so."

Adding "teeth": Because teens' profiles usually reflect a major investment of time and emotion on their part, it's important to have consequences for violations of Terms of Service, so this is good: "Provide warnings to users about uploading photos to their profile, for example: ‘Photos may not contain nudity, violent or offensive material, or copyrighted images. If you violate these terms, your account may be deleted'" (5.3 on p. 27).

2. Neutrals and negatives

A bit of irony. Based on where young Britons do most of their social networking (MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook), there's a certain irony to the fact that another government's guidelines are aimed largely at a group of companies based in the US. That's not to say this is true in countries where English isn't the primary language (though California-based Orkut, Hi5, and Friendster are huge in Brazil, Thailand, and the Philippines, respectively), but safety on the social Web clearly has to be an international effort going forward.

Only the beginning. The guidelines are a great base to build on but don't indicate an understanding of the full range of abuse in social sites, where it comes from or actually occurs, and how hard it is to control - for example, how abuse reports can themselves be abuse ("prank" abuse reports that themselves are harassment of a user by the person "reporting" the abuse) and how some content cannot be moderated or pre-viewed by the service provider because it's from malicious hackers or in third-party sites marketing x-rated content (see "Mother-son digital divide bridged" below). The guidelines need to go further in acknowledging that the users themselves are not the only source of some of the inappropriate content in social-networking sites. Increasingly, third parties are finding ways to socially engineer or hack their messages, images, and software code into users' profiles, blogs, bulletins, and IMs in social-networking sites.

"He said, she said." The term "imposter profile" doesn't come up in the guidance, and this is a huge problem for the social sites, which - if responsible enough to take on the task - have to figure out if a profile is fact or fiction (even basic, non-abusive profiles created by people about themselves have plenty of fiction in them) and if the person behind it is real, fictitious, or malicious. How bad it makes its subject look can be one measure, but that sort of analysis is usually pretty subjective, and chasing down facts is at best time-consuming, if not impossible when the site involves millions of profiles. Even in a court of law, when the accused and the victim are physically present, it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Society has not even begun to understand the complexities of coping with online harassment.

Privacy not all good. The premise that privacy in social-networking sites for children is good seems to be unqualified. To say it isn't always sounds like heresy, when we constantly hear "don't post personal info online," but it's only mostly good because privacy tools can also be a barrier to parents', researchers', and law enforcement's efforts to monitor children's activities. Too, posting personal information online is a fact of life for teenagers, and research released over a year ago suggested a new approach to this subject (see this article in the Archive of Pediatrics).

More on mobiles needed. Best-practice thinking obviously needs to match the fluidity and mobility of young people's socializing in terms of devices, technologies, and location. Under "GPS and Location Services," the guidance says that mobile "customers are very sensitive about giving away their location. Only those services that carefully respect customers’ rights to protect their privacy will be successful." This is not necessarily true about teenage customers. Given where adolescents are in their brain development (acknowledged on p. 15 of the guidance under "US Perspective" but also treated thoroughly in the Byron Review - see this), special care will need to be given to how minors use GPS technology for socializing with their friends.

In the "back office." The guidance is light on addressing what needs to happen in social-networking sites' customer-service departments after abuse reports come in - response time, how various types of reports are responded to, proportion of customer-service staff devoted to youth protection, what gets elevated to law enforcement, etc. This needs to be looked at more closely going forward.

Related links

Proposed UK law: The other part of this work by the Home Office is a new law that would require convicted sex offenders to provide their email addresses to law enforcement, "who will take these and send them to social-networking sites for blacklisting," iBLS.com reports. Failure to comply could result in five years' imprisonment if Parliament passes the law.

Under the minimum: Just about half (49%) of the UK's 8-to-17-year-olds have an online profile, and some 27% of 8-to-11-year-olds (all below the minimum age of every social site I know of) who are aware of social networking sites and have Net access have an online profile, according to a just-released study by Ofcom, Britain's communications and broadcasting regulator cited by inthenews.co.uk.

"Home Office calls for better security on social networking sites" in the Times of London

"Social networks: Will the government crack down?" from the BBC

"Facebook, MySpace to carry 999 link" in The Telegraph

"Social networking safety plan unveiled" in The Guardian

"Pedophiles forced to register email addresses" at VNUNET.com

"Children flock to social networks" from the BBC.

Former bullies help fight bullying

Here's a concept: Have former bullies star in a film to educate teens about bullying. That's the idea behind "The Stories of Us," a 25-minute film that's fiction but looks more like a documentary to some educators, who are showing it in American schools, the Chicago Tribune reports. Teens wrote, acted in, and produced it. One of them, McKenzie Bonnett, was bullied in 5th grade and then - when her parents were getting a divorce and she feared a brother would be deployed in Iraq - she started bullying other girls, she told the Trib. Another US anti-bullying education film starring teens is "Adina's Deck," created by Stanford University graduate student Debbie Heimowitz (see this item). In the UK, a film called "Let's Fight It Together" produced by Childnet International is picking up steam in Britain. In Australia, Brainstorm Productions presents live performances in elementary, middle, and secondary schools about bullying, aggression, harassment, and similar topics.

UK: 2 valuable views on Net safety, Part 1

Two milestone documents out of the UK - one a 200-page report requested by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and called "The Byron Review" after its lead author, clinical psychologist and TV personality, Dr. Tanya Brown, and the other a set of guidelines for social-networking-service best practices issued by the Home Office itself - have just been released. With the exception of references to British law and government, both are relevant wherever young people are online, including in the US, where we haven't yet been able to come up with a consensus on best practices (even though the world's most popular social sites are US-based) and haven't seen a comprehensive Net-safety report since Web 1.0 days (the COPA Commission in 2000 and the "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet" report of 2002). Maybe some contributions like these will emerge from the work of the Internet Safety Task Force that just got started at Harvard's Berkman Center.

This week a look at the Byron report - not a summary, just what I feel is universally relevant and merits highlighting. Next week: the Home Office's guidance.

The Byron Review

Right up front, in her introduction, Dr. Byron says something important about risk and child development: "My Review is about ... [young people's] right to take the risks that form an inherent part of their development by enabling them to play video games and surf the net in a safe and informed way." In focus groups, she listened to young people, thereby "putting them at the heart of this Review - and by replacing emotion with evidence - I hope I have provided some very necessary focus to what is a very necessary debate."

An individual thing. She advises her readers to factor in children's individuality, developmental stages, and what we know about teenage brain development in looking at both the risks and benefits of their Internet and videogame use. In talks, emails, and our ConnectSafely.org forum, I've often suggested to parents that their own children, if communicative, are by far their best sources on what social networking is like, not the news media, because the way they socialize online and off is a reflection of who they are. Social networking is as individual as socializing, and generalizations aren't useful. So it's good to see a psychologist saying: "We need to take into account children’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities, because the factors that can discriminate a ‘beneficial’ from a ‘harmful’ experience online and in video games will often be individual factors in the child.... That means focusing on the child, what we know about how children’s brains develop, how they learn and how they change as they grow up. This is not straightforward" (for more on teenage brains, see point no. 2.29 on p. 35).

The report's balance: "Having considered the evidence, I believe we need to move from a discussion about the media ‘causing’ harm to one which focuses on children and young people, what they bring to technology and how we can use our understanding of how they develop to empower them to manage risks..." (p. 2). To "manage risks" I'd add "manage their own online behavior." In other words, by teaching our children respect, civility and citizenship online as well as off, we improve their chances for safe, constructive, and productive use of the Net and mobile phones.

Kids' risk management. Why "manage" and not remove risks? "Risk taking," Byron says (p. 20), "is part of child development - part of our drive to learn and to succeed. Particularly in adolescence, risk taking is not only a developmental imperative but also a lifestyle choice: it is driven by developments taking place in the brain and it is an important part of identity construction. Taking risks is something children need to do to reach self-actualisation (the process of fully developing ones personal potential...), and most children get pleasure from taking risks." This seems to reflect a growing recognition that the participatory Web + developing adolescent brains = a highly volatile formula (see "The 'Wild West' metaphor" below).

The other digital divide. Byron says the main driver of concerns about youth online risk is the "generational digital divide," the parental anxiety produced by 1) kids being more tech-literate than adults and 2) adults being stuck back in Web 1.0 ("many adults being of the Web 1.0 generation, using the internet to search for information or for shopping while our children are the Web 2.0 generation, using the technology in increasingly sophisticated ways to create and upload their own material" - p. 23). I agree, and it's one reason why we individually and collectively overreact, which can increase youth risk because it breaks down parent-child communication that can help mitigate risky teen behavior and tends to send teens "underground" (see also "Banning doesn't work" below).

Parenting in a risk-averse society. Apparently it's the case on both sides of the Atlantic and a challenge for parents trying not to overreact. Byron writes, "Most parents want to parent their children as well as they can and will take active steps to seek out approaches to enable them to do the best they can for their children. They want to give their children the best start in life by ensuring that they are healthy, happy, cared for and educated. For parents an area of great concern is around harm coming to their child. Indeed such parental anxieties can be fuelled by news stories that contain graphic details about children being abducted, harmed or killed. Some commentators have speculated that increasing parental anxieties are significant factors in the way restrictions are placed on children’s freedoms – for example, in the way children’s play has been significantly curtailed by parents who fear letting them outside. We are creating a parenting atmosphere where there is a 'zero risk' policy. The safety of children should be a central concern for parents and society as a whole. However, our concerns, and our response to those concerns, must be proportionate" (p. 206). Hear, hear! on all the above.

Where the risk actually is. Or rather where it originates: usually in "RL" (real life), not online. The online-safety field is still young, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that, from what I'm seeing in the research, the term "online safety" may already be obsolete - or necessarily heading toward obsolescence. Why? Because young people make little distinction between online and offline, and the Internet increasingly mirrors "real life" for them and humanity as a whole. Research is also increasingly indicating that the young people most at risk online are those most at risk offline, and we need to get a lot of expertise other than that of online-safety advocates like me into the discussion - for example, the expertise of child-development specialists, pediatricians, social workers, and psychologists. Though risky behaviors and activities are acted out and reinforced online, the Internet is not the problem itself so much as both aggravator (negative) and tool for understanding and helping vulnerable teens (positive).

Banning doesn't work. Nor do other blanket "solutions." My comment just above is reflected in a way I haven't seen articulated before in Chapter 4 of Byron's study (p. 87): "Harmful behaviours are discussed online in a range of different ways, some of which may be more negative for young people to be involved in. However, they may provide an outlet for young people who feel they have no other way to express their feelings. Allowing these discussions to take place in mainstream areas of the internet, where there are responsible content hosts, means that steps can be taken to put them in context.... Banning such content risks driving vulnerable young people away to more obscure sites, where efforts to provide context might not be present."

A flipside to consider. "In fact," Byron continues, "it has been argued that banning such content from mainstream sites might draw attention to harmful behaviours in a way that makes them seem more attractive.... It is also important to remember that if troubled young people are able to discuss their feelings online, it allows us as a society to recognise these issues exist and, as best we can, inform our approach to dealing with them in the offline world."

More on phones, gaming community, etc. I was surprised by several things in the report: 1) that mobile phones didn't have their own chapter - they were mainly in a section about children accessing Web content away from home (for years I've been seeing British media reports about bullying on phones there); 2) that, though online gaming and virtual worlds are rapidly catching up with console gaming in popularity, the Conclusion on videogames risks (p. 154) focused on content and "addiction," not on contact, for example in the Xbox Live community and online worlds and games; and...

The "Wild West" metaphor. The third thing that surprised me was the strange take on this much-used metaphor in the report's Conclusion (p. 206): "The sphere of new media is sometimes described as being like the ‘Wild West’ – a landscape populated by cynical, selfish characters with no regard for the welfare of children." Byron kind of misses the flavor of that lawless, uncontrollable, scary, Darwinian time and place, and - though a virtual "place" - the social Web, with its real-world impact, isn't much different (see this week's awful story about teen bullying in Florida or last year's "extreme cyberbullying" cases in New Zealand or the current "Naked photo-sharing trend" in a number of US states). "Throughout the internet and video games industries, Government and regulators, the law enforcement community, the charitable and voluntary sector, and the world of education and children’s services there are countless individuals committed to supporting children and parents to deal with the risks that new technologies may present." No question about it, nevertheless these cases still come up.

What we can work toward. Helpfully, because the challenges are many, Byron organizes them into three "strategic objectives" for children's online safety on p. 62 of her report:

1. "Reduce availability [of harmful contact and contact to online kids] ... and the conduciveness of platforms to harmful and inappropriate conduct"
2. "Restrict access ... and reduce ... harmful and inappropriate conduct"
3. "Increase resilience: Equip children to deal with exposure to harmful and inappropriate content and contact, and equip parents to help their children deal with these things and parent effectively around incidences of harmful and inappropriate conduct by their children."

We all - parents, Internet companies, advocates, government, law enforcement, researchers - have been working on the first two since the early '90s, and the effort continues, with no end in sight. The third is, through education, the most immediately actionable. It reinforces what some of us have been saying on the US side of the pond for some time: that it's increasingly imperative to help children develop the filter between their ears - critical thinking and media literacy, so they can think not only about what they're reading, seeing, and hearing online and on phones, but also about what they're saying, doing, and uploading.

Related links

The Byron Review (there are links on this page to the full report, the executive summary, and a summary for children and teens, all in pdf format)

"Byron urges social-networking safety code" at The Guardian.

"At a glance: The Byron Review" at the BBC

A commentary at The Independent

A commentary at The Guardian

Microsoft's response at The Telegraph.

Cyberbullying: Clarity needed

One of the most surprising things about this bullying story in the New York Times is that the boy is still at the same school in Fayetteville, Ark., after several years of victimization - and now, in the days of full-fledged online schools providing high school degrees. Distance learning is definitely an option for kids, in addition to switching brick-and-mortar schools, but maybe it's not an option for Billy Wolfe, and I'm editorializing.

What's really important to know is how unusual this tragic story is. There are many, many shades of bullying and cyberbullying, we're learning from solid research, and it's important to understand this so that we in no way discount less extreme experiences of bullying young people have.

"Bullying can happen once a week or once a month; it can be an isolated event or something that happens for years; it can be online, offline, or both. It is a varied behavior and it can be upsetting and have psychological impacts across the board; or not. You do not need to be beat up every day and taunted in every environment to be affected," wrote Dr. Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids in a recent email to a few of us online-safety advocates.

Here are some brand-new findings from her latest "Growing Up with Media" study of 11-to-16-year-olds....

"School is overwhelmingly the most common environment that kids 11-16 years of age are bullied in," with almost a third of kids saying they've been bullied there. Eleven percent have been bullied online and 10% "in the community (e.g., on the way to and from school)." Six percent have been bullied by cellphone.

Only very small percentages of young people have been bullied monthly or more often - the most, 5%, at school, and 2% have been bullied that often online. Because being bullied monthly or more often is so uncommon, wrote Dr. Ybarra, "you can see how this particular subset of youth is particularly concerning from a health and development perspective."

In other findings, it's heartening to see that almost two-thirds of 11-to-16-year-olds - 63% - "are not bullied anywhere; 17% report being bullied in one environment, 9% in two environments, 5% in three, 2% in four, and a very concerning 3% report being bullied in all five environments assessed" (school, Internet, cellphone, community, and "other").

Michele also sent an important caveat for everyone concerned about cyberbullying: the need to be very clear on what we're talking about: "The term ‘cyberbullying’ (in my opinion) has been mis- and over-used to describe any sort of unwanted or untoward action that occurs online. The definition of bullying is something that happens repeatedly and over time, and is inclusive of an imbalance of power (this is a common definition in the psychology literature). Some of the things that we have heard about that have happened online fit this definition. Others are more akin to ‘harassment’ or ‘defamation’ or other things."

Staging fights for Web video-sharing

It has become "an Internet rage for teens and young adults," the Chicago Tribune reports (story picked up by RedOrbit.com). And - judging by the popularity of other negative adolescent uses of cellphones (see last week's feature on naked photo-sharing) - it could be true. The Trib leads with the account of five 8th-graders huddled around a camera phone watching "video of a fake fight they staged in a bathroom at Benjamin Middle School. They had filmed multiple rounds of a shoving match ... and planned to post it on YouTube." Some of the fights kids post aren't staged. The New York Times this week ran a tragic story about a long-term bullying victim. The online part of the bullying is on p. 2: "A couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called 'Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.' It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Social Web for good, bad

There are so many good things about social-networking, from the social activism it supports to the lives saved to the way far-flung friends can stay in touch. But there's a definite darkside, and JuicyCampus is a good example of a corner of it, reports my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in the San Jose Mercury News. "The site, which was reportedly founded by a 1995 Duke graduate, encourages students at selected colleges ranging from the Air Force Academy to Yale to anonymously post 'juicy' comments about other students. And some of these comments can be downright vicious. All of this is under the veil of anonymity." He added that a bit surfing of the site turned up cruel posts about people's sexual preferences, true or not.... One posting implied a certain named female student was available for sex with strangers and included her cell phone number and dorm information." What's sad is that the law protects the site better than it does the victims of defamation and cyberbullying in it. He quotes the CEO of ReputationDefender.com as saying that, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, "a record company has a better chance of getting a judgment against a college student sharing music than a college student has against someone jeopardizing his or her reputation, privacy or even safety." [See also "Is Social Networking Good for Society?" at the New York Times.]

Naked photo-sharing trend: Police perspective

This is a trend deserving parents' and, for that matter, everyone else's attention - especially teens'. The Associated Press report of Utah middle-schoolers taking and sending nude photos on their cellphones joins similar reports from Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Georgia in the past few months. And in 2007 the child-porn-distribution convictions of two Florida teens were upheld in a state appeals court (they'd taken sexually explicit photos of themselves and sent them to the boy's personal email account).

In the Utah case, the prosecutor told the AP that police expect to see more cases like this - they were in fact dealing with "several other similar unrelated cases" - and he is not alone in his struggle to figure out how to handle cases involving teens distributing photos that in effect constitute child pornography depicting themselves and their peers. They cover a full range of behavior, from impulsive to developmentally fairly normal adolescent risk assessment to outright harassment and bullying. For example, here's what investigators discovered in the Georgia case, as reported by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children:

"Some girls were peer-pressured into taking inappropriate images of themselves and sending them to the boys. Others complied with the boys’ requests for pictures because they had crushes on the boys. Many of the girls suffered from low self-esteem or did not understand the seriousness of the situation because 'everybody is doing it.' Few realized their images were being circulated throughout the school and, in one case, traded with a suspect in the United Kingdom. In another case, one of the boys was charging students at the school $25 to view graphic images of one of the female victims. As of this writing, investigators have tracked down hundreds of images, and at least one video, involving these victims." [A partial report is under the second heading on this page at NCMEC.org.]

It's important for teens and parents to know that these cases, which could technically be treated as federal felonies (child-porn distribution), are posing a real challenge to prosecutors. Det. Frank Dannahey, a youth officer in Connecticut for 17 years, agrees that this is a growing problem. A member of our Advisory Board, he emailed me last week in reference to my item on the Alabama case (and kindly gave me permission to publish his email, which describes a local case that struck him and offers teens some things to consider if they're ever tempted to share intimate photos online or on phones):

"I have to agree that it would not be in the best interest of the kids to have them charged with a federal crime," Detective Dannahey wrote. "I really don’t believe they understand the implications of what they are doing. You and I have been talking about this topic for a long time [see his description of a 13-year-old Connecticut girl's ordeal in "Teen photos and a police officer's story," January 2006].

"I can’t tell you how many of these cases I have had to deal with or assist other agencies with," he continued. "The long-term implications for these kids can be serious - not to mention the initial humiliation and embarrassment. I see these photos becoming an instrument in online bullying/harassment.

"I just recently closed a case in which a middle school girl shared nude photos of herself to males she met through IM sessions. In a different twist, the girl told me that she gave them (sent) the photos after being 'intimidated' online by the boys," he wrote. "This is a very shy girl one would not expect to do this sort of thing. The girl told me that the boys she communicated with had a sort of 'power' over her in manipulating her to do something that she never thought she could do [which sounds to me like the Georgia case]. She was highly embarrassed by it. This was something that I had not heard before. When kids do this sort of thing it is usually meant to be a private thing between boyfriends/girlfriends. Of course we all know that teen love doesn’t last forever and, when the breakup happens, these types of photos get 'out there.' This is certainly an issue that I address in programs with parents and teens.

"In cases where a teen sends a 'private' photo to someone and it ends up being leaked to other people, the teen’s question to me is always the same - will anyone else see the image? Unfortunately, my answer to that question is always the same: 'I don’t know'," Dannahey continued. "Years ago, if a paper photo was taken from someone, they could possibly get it back, rip it up, and destroy the negative. Today in the digital age, getting a photo back that has been sent electronically is difficult at best and more likely improbable.

"I will usually tell teens the following when considering the sending of 'private' digital photos/videos to people online: Because digital media is so easily shared and reproduced, you need to consider several things before hitting the Send button:

"Are you willing to take the chance that someone other than your intended recipient will see your images?

"Will those images be a source of embarrassment or humiliation to you?

"Are you willing to take the chance that the images may be a 'career killer' or prevent you from some future opportunity?

"Will the images/videos that you send violate the law?"

Readers, if anything like this has come up at your house or school, please share your experiences - or post them in our forum at ConnectSafely.org. Thank you! Fellow parents or educators can benefit from your experience.

JuicyCampus: Is there an upside?

Is it that the online gossipmongers think it's just a joke? JuicyCampus.com, where students can "slime" each other, may have one upside: The site could be a good talking point for parents and teens to discuss what is and isn't ethical treatment of peers online. "The content on JuicyCampus is identical to the banter heard in dorm rooms for centuries. But now the whole planet can listen in, including those being maligned, even as the speakers' identities are better protected than ever," the Washington Post reports. The site does not take responsibility for its content and is probably protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which courts to date have found to shield Internet service providers from liability for the content that users post. "If the offending post is about you, too bad," the Post adds, quoting site info as saying, "JuicyCampus does not remove content. We encourage you to shift your point of view...." It mentions one University of Virginia student who'd been "named on the site as sexually promiscuous" and who didn't really want to know who named her as such but does worry "that having her name on the site could jeopardize the job she just landed with a government agency. She wishes the site didn't exist but says nothing can be done...." [See also "Window on cyberbullying" and "Public humiliation on the social Web."]

Just how risky is the Net for kids?

That's the question dad and tech writer David Pogue looks at in a recent column of his at the New York Times. He writes about a past writing assignment on the subject, but now he looks at the kid-danger question in a new light: "As my own children approach middle school, my own fears align with the [PBS "Growing Up Online"] documentary’s findings in another way: that cyberbullying is a far more realistic threat. Kids online experiment with different personas, and can be a lot nastier in the anonymous atmosphere of the Internet than they would ever be in person (just like grown-ups). And their mockery can be far more painful when it’s public, permanent and written than if they were just muttered in passing in the hallway." Hear, hear! More helpful perspective can be found at the blog of author Nancy Willard here. [See also "Growing Up Online: Discussion Needed," linking to the PBS show, which can be viewed in full online.]

Public humiliation on the social Web

Judging from emails to and posts in the ConnectSafely.org forum, not to mention news about social networking, online public humiliation - harassment, cyberbullying, imposter profiles, etc. is a growing problem for adults as well as tweens and teens (see this week's "Window on cyberbullying").

Social stigma has its place in society, but for its role to remain appropriate and useful, we - society wherever people use the social Web - need to keep the Web version from getting completely out of control. Newsweek gives some examples of these online forms of harassment. What can be done? Well, first, it's not useful to place all the blame on social sites. Newsweek illustrates right at the top how public humiliation of the "starwars kid" long predated social networking. Even the Internet can't be blamed - most Americans have heard of NBC's "To Catch a Predator" on the old medium of TV. Certainly, social-networking sites need to be responsible and responsive to abuse reports, but a pile-on of public blame (mostly in the news media) in a single place only delays problem-solving.

Public shaming is an element of human nature, not technology, and it's going to take a conscious effort on everybody's part - youth, parents, educators, counselors and responsible Internet companies - to help keep this darkside of human nature under control on the Net as well as in the rest of human life.

You may've noticed lawmakers weren't on that list in the last paragraph. Certainly as a part of society they can help too, but laws aren't very effective regulators of noncriminal human behavior, and - as Newsweek reports - "laws on free speech and defamation vary widely between countries [social sites in many cases cover multiple countries]. In the United States, proving libel requires the victim to show that his or her persecutor intended malice, while the British system puts the burden on the defense to show that a statement is not libelous (making it much easier to prosecute)." As well, in US courts so far, the 1996 Communications Decency Act has protected social sites and other Internet services from liability for the speech and behavior of their users.

Just for starters, we all need to be thinking about and discussing - in homes, classrooms, the media - the impact of exploiting the non-face-to-face disinhibition of Internet communication with cruel or destructive communication - how it affects the perpetrator as well as the victim and society, and how good citizenship is just as important online as off. Recent milestone research at the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that aggressive behavior can put the aggressor himself at greater risk (see this commentary at ConnectSafely.org). There never was an easy way to stop this base human tendency to seek empowerment through the humiliation of others, and online it's even harder to take harmful behavior back. Let's help our children think about how harmful it is to one's own integrity, as well as to others', to cause and perpetuate their humiliation online.

Window on cyberbullying

For some valuable high school students' views on cyberbullying, see the Paly Voice, the students online newspaper of Palo Alto High School. For example, it tells of how "many students who use Facebook to bully each other do not leave negative comments directly on each other's profiles because their identities would be made public." Instead they leave them in a widget-enabled spot called "Honesty Box," where "students are not afraid to go all out, holding nothing back." Facebook reportedly maintains a neutral position on these little applications that third parties offer to its users, and some are pure entertainment, but others seem to lend themselves more to negative behavior than positive. "In addition to the Honesty Box, other applications such as 'Compare People' allow them to bully their peers." And they do, the Paly Voice says: "In Compare People, photos of two random students are presented with a question and a third peer votes on which friend fits the question more. Anyone who has the application can vote their peers superlatives like 'Most popular' and 'Hottest'."

Social sites safer than chat, IM: Study

Parents, don't just talk with your kids about social networking - chat sites and instant messaging really need to be in the conversation too. Despite the news media's focus on social-networking sites as the locus of online child exploitation, it turns out chat sites and instant-messaging are where most sexual solicitation and cyberbullying is happening. But even in those "places" online, "only 15% of children [aged 10-15] experience unwanted sexual solicitation and only a third report being harassed online," reports HealthDay News, citing a new study in Pediatrics. Here's the difference found between social sites and IM or chat: 4% of the nearly 1,600 children surveyed "reported experiencing an unwanted sexual solicitation and 9% reported being harassed while on a social networking site. Solicitations were reported 59% more often in instant messaging and 19% more often in chat rooms than social networking sites. More surprising, harassments were reported 96% more often in instant messaging than in social networking sites," say the study's authors - Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids and Kimberly Mitchell of the University of New Hampshire - in the study's press release. Their advice for parents: "Internet safety is not just about whether your child is on MySpace or not. You should know what your children are doing on MySpace and Facebook. But you also need to know what your children are doing in school, after school, at parties, at the mall, online - basically all environments in which they engage."

Cyberbullying and free speech

Legislation proposed around the US after the tragic case of a Missouri teen's suicide following cyberbullying is fuel for an important discussion about whether such laws are needed. "Officials from Megan [Meier]’s town of Dardenne Prairie wasted no time unanimously passing a statute that makes Internet harassment a local misdemeanor," writes ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in a commentary at CBSNEWS.com. "Others have called for state and federal legislation to make it a crime to post comments anonymously or under an assumed identity." Larry points to the unintended consequences of overreaching laws drafted in reaction to an extremely rare occurrence. What is not rare - and in fact affects millions of young people - is online bullying by peers. Dealing with age-old social problem that is now common online and - overseas and increasingly in the US on mobile phones - is going to take a great deal of education and rational, not reactive, discussion in schools, homes, legislatures, and the media. Previous NetFamilyNews coverage of the Meier case can be found here and here.

Where online kids' worries lie

A quick snapshot from a UK researcher halfway through her cyberbullying study: Well-known psychologist Tanya Byron told the Oxford Media Convention that "children are more worried about being bullied in cyberspace than any threat from paedophiles," the Financial Times reports. On pedophiles, she quoted one girl as telling her, "We kind of know who the creepy people are and what they say, and we kind of ignore them." The research shows that, "although children were adept at exploiting the ignorance of their parents about the internet and gaming, many would prefer to be able to talk to their mother or father about their online lives," the FT added. None of this sounds any different from what we're seeing and hearing on the western side of the Pond.

'Teenage hell': What to do

What is it going to take to convince teens of how important it is to think about the impact mean behavior can have online? For example, just annoyed with a high school friend, three teens "placed an ad in [the 15-year-old's] name soliciting sex with men, listing his home phone number," the San Jose Mercury News reports. They also somehow "hacked into his MySpace profile" and changed it to say he was gay. People answered the ad at his house, reaching his is sister and mom. "Mortified, angry and distraught," the boy dropped out of school. The article cites the view of some school officials who say they're not sure the Net is increasing the amount of bullying, but rather that it's providing a "paper trail." Young people just don't realize that they're not as anonymous as they think they are. And that's exactly what can help them think before they're mean online. For example, the Mercury News refers to the shock felt by "some students at one San Jose middle school who created a MySpace 'slut list' of 23 girls and asked viewers to submit comments. Within 36 hours the site was shut down, and the culprits discovered." As for the boys who took out the abusive ad above: Working with police, officials at their school them found them out. They "were tried and sentenced to probation and community service. They also had to write an essay about the pain they caused."

Missouri cyberbullying: Case not closed

There have been two new developments in the tragic cyberbullying case in Missouri that broke last November (see "Extreme cyberbullying"): 1) Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are looking at charging the adult neighbor who created the imposter profile that led to the Missouri teen's suicide, the Los Angeles Times reports. "Prosecutors in Missouri said they were unable to find a statute under which to pursue a criminal case." The US Attorney's Office in L.A. believes it has jurisdiction because MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, and - creatively, the Times cites a legal experts as saying - the L.A. prosecutors are exploring charges involving federal wire fraud and cyber fraud because the woman "defrauded MySpace" by creating the imposter account, the Times cites anonymous sources as saying. The First Amendment could be a big hurdle for them, but if they're successful, the case could be groundbreaking because of all the fake profiles people create all over the social Web, for both benign and malicious reasons. 2) The other development, online vigilantism, is described in depth in the Washington Post. Wanting to avenge Megan's death, people have "combed public records online to post photos of Lori and Curt Drew along with heated messages demanding they be held accountable. Satellite images of the house were also posted, along with the Drews' address and phone numbers, and details about where each worked.... What lawmakers couldn't or wouldn't do, virtual vigilantes quickly did," the Post reports. Also at the Post, see this online discussion of the Megan Meier case between readers and Daniel J. Solove, associate law professor at George Washington University and author of "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet. Its insightful last Q&A is about virtual mobs and online shaming.

Tech first aid for '08 & onward

Filtering, monitoring, and other parental-control technology can be useful items in the family Internet first-aid kit, depending on kids' ages and maturity levels. But the most effective, always-age-appropriate tools these days are information and communication - as kids' knowledge of workarounds and malicious hackers' use of social engineering grow. Ideally, parents and kids are working together to develop children's mental filters in three areas - online safety, cybercitizenship, and computer security - folding both kids' tech literacy and parents' life literacy into the discussion.

Online safety and citizenship overlap, because now, as Internet access becomes ever more available beyond the home, young people's best protections online and off are critical thinking and intelligent behavior. We all hear so much about "predators" in the news media, but a lot of the "predation" or sexual solicitation targeting teens comes from peers or young adults and a lot of it has always been called "flirting." Aggressive behavior toward others online (mean gossip, dissing, acting out, seeking out risk for its own sake, talking with people they don't know about sex) puts the aggressor at greater risk, research is now showing - at risk of being cyberbullied as well as sexually exploited (see "New approach to online-safety ed suggested"). We need to think of our children less as potential victims and more as participants in this space, calibrating our parenting and online-safety messaging to the social Web.

Please don't misunderstand: Pedophiles seek out kids online, but they can't hurt your child if he or she doesn't respond. It's the kids "looking for trouble" - those most at risk offline - who are most at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim").

So ongoing communication about the importance of thinking critically about what kids say and how they act and react online is the most vital element in the first-aid kit (household or classroom). Another need: media literacy and being smart about what they click on and download - checking out widgets before they add them, analyzing the source and value of info encountered online, asking a friend if s/he really sent a link or attachment before clicking, researching a product before buying it online, checking out someone's profile before adding him as a friend, deleting weird comments and blocking the creeps from commenting again. Parental critical thinking needs to be in the kit, too, as parents ask questions appropriate for their own children's maturity levels - whether Mom should require that she knows everyone on a child's friends list or Dad should be on that IM buddy list, whether or how much to monitor a profile, whether parents help set preferences in an application or privacy features for a social-networking profiles, etc.

Here are some basic articles to include in the kit for developing mental filters: "How social influencing works," "How to recognize grooming," "If Gandhi had a MySpace profile," and this week's "Social networkers = spin doctors." As for computer security, that's essential too, and here are 7 clearly written steps to that end from Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro. And if you feel a child is immediately at risk of victimization, contact your local police and CyberTipline.com (or 800.843.5678) at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

YouTube's push to beat bullying

YouTube has set up an anti-bullying channel, the BBC reports. The channel "aims to revolutionise how young people access information on how to avoid being bullied and importantly on how to avoid being the person who does the intimidating." Here's YouTube's channel (see also "What does cyberbullying look like?"). It comes at a good time, as the story of a US cyberbullying incident that ended in a young teen's suicide (see NetFamilyNews last week) has been picked up by news media in multiple countries (see these in Google News search). National-level coverage in the US started later last week. ABC News's Good Morning America and NBC's Today Show interviewed the girl's parents, saying local police are concerned about vigilantism against the family that allegedly created the profile of a fictional boy which was reportedly central to the story. Calls for a regulatory response to this case reflect a misunderstanding of how social networking works, but national-level awareness, even indignation (not vigilantism), is an important step toward this society's working toward nationwide public education about bullying on any digital device.

Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light

Unlike other extreme cyberbullying cases I've written about, this one occurred in the US and ended in a teenager's suicide. In this case, covered this week in a suburban newspaper in the St. Louis area, Megan Meier, 13, committed suicide allegedly because a 16-year-old boy had changed his mind and no longer wanted to be her friend. It was a cyberbullying case because the "relationship," from beginning to end, was conducted entirely online. Adding to the tragedy, the "boy" never existed. As in the New Zealand cases, the "owner" of the social-networking profile around which the "relationship" developed was a fictional character.

What's different about this case - and what makes it even more perplexing - is that the cyberbully, the creator of the fictional profile and relationship, was an adult. The mother of a teenage girl who had parted ways with Megan allegedly created a MySpace profile for "Josh." The story she made up - because, she told the paper, she wanted to see what Megan would say about her daughter online - was that "Josh" was new in town, being home-schooled, came from a "broken home," and had no phone number. Helped by her daughter and another teenage girl, the mother reportedly had this fictitious boy contact Megan through her MySpace profile and ask her to "friend" him. The girl, who had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and struggled with being overweight, reportedly was thrilled - for the six weeks last fall that the Josh profile's creators led her on. She committed suicide on Oct. 16, 2006.

No criminal charges have been filed, the Suburban Journals reports, and the parents "do not plan to file a civil lawsuit." A police report has been filed, but local law enforcement told the paper there was no charge that fit the case. There was a brief FBI investigation, the Journals reports. It spoke of problems the FBI had accessing content on the family's hard drive, but it didn't mention whether the FBI contacted MySpace with a subpoena for evidence on its servers. The town's working on making online harassment a crime, a "Class B misdemeanor," the Journals reported separately, "punishable by 90 days in jail and/or a $500 fine." At the state level, that would be a Class A misdemeanor, possibly leading to a year's imprisonment and/or a $1,000 fine, the Journals added. Missouri State Rep. Cynthia Davis, R-19th District, of O'Fallon (Mo.) said she would explore proposing state legislation but acknowledged that cyberbullying is a problem that goes well beyond town, state, and even national jurisdictions.

The case could eventually have national implications, starting at least with raising public awareness. The hundreds of individual responses posted below the article fill about 90% of the Web page, and the story apparently has caught national media attention - CNN was to interview Megan's parents this week, the Journals said. SuburbanJournals.com added that local officials said they would call on the federal government to address cyberbullying.

Related links

On the latest US cyberbullying research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project

"Cyberethics training needed"

Various aspects of the cyberbullying problem

"'eBullies': Coping with cyberbullying"

"Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check"

"Extreme cyberbullying: 2 cases"

Cyberbullying & Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress, by Nancy E. Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use

Cyberbullying.ca - a help site by award-winning Canadian educator Bill Belsey

Cyberbullying.us - a research site by Profs. Sameer Hinduja Florida Atlantic University and Justin Patchin at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Japan's cyberbullying problem

Bullying can be 24/7 in Japan too, but there it's as much over the phone as on the Web in this country where 96% of high school students have mobile phones. Reuters cites the experience of now 19-year-old Makoto, who stopped going to school it was getting so bad. But even after that he "became anorexic and rarely emerged from his room for nearly half a year," and he attempted suicide twice. Reuters adds that "the problem drew public attention in July, when an 18-year-old boy leapt to his death at his high school in Kobe, in western Japan, after classmates posted a nude photo of him on a Web site and repeatedly sent him emails demanding money." Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that Disney is partnering with Softbank, Japan's No. 3 mobile carrier, to offer cellphones complete with Disney content and services for kids in that country.

New book on cyberbullying

The good news is there are usually no physical scars from cyberbullying. The bad news is there are usually no physical scars to alert parents to what's going on. And that's not even the biggest problem with cyberbullying: "that children will not report it," reports CNET, citing a new academic book on the subject, Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age, by Patricia Agatston, a licensed counselor and consultant on bullying, psychology Prof. Robin Kowalski at Clemson University, and Sue Limber, director of the Center on Youth Participation and Human Rights at Clemson. Rather than report cyberbullying, kids "try to deal with it themselves for fear of being cut off. Many times parents will overreact and punish the victim by forbidding them to continue using things like instant messaging, blogs, or a social network." Overreaction and overprotection are increasingly risky these days because of the damage they can do to parent-child communication in a time when the Web is so ubiquitous on so many devices in so many places, and communication with caring adults is the most reliable protection kids have.

Cyberbullying ed: 'Adina's Deck'

Childnet's video is for everybody, including teens. "Adina's Deck" is for girls 9-14. It's "a 30-minute interactive 'choose your own adventure' television pilot series" starring four tech-literate girls who have either been cyberbullies or victims and who "use their experiences to help solve their peers' Internet mysteries." It's also a parent/teachers guide to educating middle-school students about cyberbullying. It was created by Stanford University graduate student Debbie Heimowitz and based on her research this year at two Bay Area middle schools. One of her key findings is that "there is a significant knowledge gap between the concepts of virtual identity and real-life consequences."

The bystander factor

When people hear about cyberbullying, they usually think of either the bully or the victim. But as we think together about how to deal with this problem (victimizing about a third of all US 12-to-17-year-old Net users and 22% of British teens*), it would be good to consider the third category of participant (yes, participant): the bystander.

On the Internet, there are a lot more "bystanders" when the bully can put mean text, photos and video in front entire peer groups or schools all at once, greatly compounding the victimization. Then there's the viral kind of bullying, when mean statements get passed along, IM'ed, cut-'n'-pasted by bystanders who suddenly become accessories to the bullying.

"Helping children to understand that they can make someone else suffer by swapping photos or commenting on video clips, and that a 'harmless bit of fun' to one person could be agonising humiliation for someone else, is really important," writes commentator Bill Thompson at the BBC, pointing to a new anti-cyberbullying program of the UK government's Department for Children, Schools and Families, written by Childnet International. Thompson writes that the program "shows how seriously the problem is being taken, and that may make it easier for children to tell someone about what is happening…. As with physical bullying, the first step to resolving the problem is to admit that it is happening and find someone who can help you take the next step."

[* The US cyberbullying numbers above were from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the UK ones were cited by Childnet International.]

What does cyberbullying look like?

Please take a look. We hear the word, and sometimes a definition - the online version of the nasty, mostly pre-adolescent behavior that's been making kids miserable for eons. But, to many adults, cyberbullying is pretty murky. With this new video, "Let's Fight It Together," Childnet International brings the picture into sharp focus (watch Childnet CEO Stephen Carrick-Davies on video explaining why a clear picture is so important).

The video is part of the London-based nonprofit organization's Digizen.org project. Like NetFamilyNews.org and ConnectSafely.org, Childnet, our sister organization, believes that "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It’s about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy - using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same," Childnet has on the project's About page. To do that, we all - youth, parents, educators, advocates - need to understand the problems as well as the positives of digital media and the Internet.

Though produced in the UK with British actors, "Let's Fight It Together" has universal relevance, and I hope it will fuel broad discussion in many countries.

Schools, state laws & cyberbullying

A Texas schools superintendent said that any online behavior that detracts from learning in school is going to get school action, and his schools have detailed but one-page Internet-use contracts students have to sign. State legislators are taking action too. Rhode Island is considering one of the toughest anti-cyberbullying laws, the Chicago Tribune reports. "Under the proposed legislation, students and their parents could be prosecuted if the student is caught sending Internet or text messages that prove disruptive to school," whether or not they send those messages from school. As for other states, "South Carolina recently passed a law that mandates school districts to define bullying, including cyberbullying. In Oregon, lawmakers have backed a bill that would require all schools to adopt policies that ban cyberbullying and allow for expulsion of those who are caught doing it." School policy and state laws may be kicking in because courts have "proved reluctant to get involved in what many may see as an age-old problem," and courts and prosecutors "have largely agreed, concluding that the 1st Amendment covers even the most offensive online speech." It might be a good idea for all adults - parents, educators, policymakers - to start thinking of online kids more as participants than as potential victims and start working with them on online citizenship as much as online safety - involve youth too in the public discussion about online behavior and the First Amendment. For more information, the Washington Times has a thorough look at cyberbullying, including how it differs from the traditional kind. And here's National Public Radio on how Virginia is out in front as "the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety."

'eBullies': Coping with cyberbullying

This is the kind of incident that adds to school absentee rates these days: In Texas, a student "posted a page that he attributed to a classmate, complete with the girl's picture and numerous photos of her alleged sex partners. Other students … were invited to view the page," the Detroit News reports. Within two days 100 students had posted comments on the page. "The boy eventually was suspended for a few days … and the victim transferred schools because she was so distraught." The victim was hesitant to tell her parents, worried she'd lose her online privileges (a fairly common reaction, research shows). The Cleveland Plain Dealer has some at-at-glance statistics on bullying, though the first one - 3 in 4 students say they've been cyberbullied - is high (the Pew Internet & American Life's latest study on this puts it at close to one-third).

Meanwhile, parents, a book by two social workers cited by the Detroit News points to "the importance of parents getting kids to feel comfortable talking about their Internet time," offering us this advice: "Start with nonforced, nonjudgmental questions about their online experiences, ideally in a casual setting, they say, such as when you're shopping for back-to-school clothes or walking the dog together. Even if the child seems bored or annoyed, he or she actually may want to talk about it. Then listen." No doubt unwritten codes of conduct are naturally developing in peer groups, in school social scenes, and all over the social Web. For students, here's a blogger on Facebook etiquette who's encouraging a discussion on her page. For educators, there's a new set of courses at BullyingCourse.com from Canadian educator Bill Belsey, creator of the award-winning Bullying.org and "the world's first Web site about cyberbullying," Cyberbullying.ca. In the US, Nancy Willard's book Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats has a section on legal considerations for schools.

More polite in virtual worlds?

CNET asks that question, and I think it's an interesting one - especially given a growing public discussion about cyberbullying and why some people are so nasty on the Web (see my earlier post on this). The question is: Are people more polite in online worlds and games with avatars than in, say, social-networking sites? And is it because there are avatars - visual representations of ourselves - instead of just text and the anonymity associated with it? Maybe virtual worlds (like Teen Second Life, Whyville.net, and There.com) are logical "places" to teach cybercitizenship and cyberethics, then. Parents, educators, and online-safety advocates concerned about social behavior online and cyberbullying might consider putting heads together with operators of tween and teen spaces online to consider making this a component of virtual worlds for youth. See also ZDNET's "When cyberbullying hits teens."

Sex offenders on MySpace: Some context

Last week Larry Magid and I co-wrote a commentary that ran in the San Jose Mercury News Sunday. Hundreds of news outlets worldwide had picked up the story that MySpace has deleted the profiles of 29,000 registered sex offenders. The news may have been shocking to a lot of parents of teen social networkers, so we felt parents deserved some perspective on this. Here's a slightly condensed version of what we wrote….

Finding and expelling sexual predators from social Web sites - something MySpace says it now does routinely - is a good thing. Other social sites are similarly cooperating with law enforcement. But this announcement from North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (see General Cooper's "Protecting Children from MySpace," a link under "What's New" on his page) was only possible because MySpace took the initiative to develop a law-enforcement tool the federal government called for in a recently passed law but failed to create: a national sex offender database that MySpace then donated to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for broader use.

Beyond the Web. Sex offenders aren't just in social-networking sites online. They're in chatrooms and newsgroups, on discussion boards and file-sharing networks. They've been on the Internet since before there was a World Wide Web, long before social networking took off. Now social sites are helping to expose their online activities.

The numbers. Let's put the 29,000 profiles in context: More will probably be found, but there are more than 190 million profiles on MySpace at the moment. Now let's move from the Net to "real life." There are 602,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. That's just registered ones - those who've been caught and convicted. The vast majority of child molesters are not strangers whom children meet online. Very, very few are strangers in real life even: According to the California Department of Justice, “90% of child victims know their offender, with almost half of the offenders being a family member. Of sexual assaults against people age 12 and up, approximately 80% of the victims know the offender."

Actual cases. Last spring I was looking for a solid figure for sexual exploitation of minors in social-networking sites after hearing Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's reference to "the towering danger of sexual predators" (see "Predators vs. cyberbullies"). General Cooper's office told me there were approximately 100 known cases in MySpace in 2005, but that number was based not on government statistics but a Lexis-Nexis search of news reports. That's 100 cases too many, but an extremely small proportion of the 12 million teens who use such sites, and it pales compared to the number of kids molested by acquaintances and family members.

No kidnappings. In all those cases, a teenager willingly got together with someone he or she met online and, contrary to what many people think, the kids often knew what they were getting into and, in every known case, went to meet the offenders themselves. This doesn't excuse these crimes in any way, but parents need to understand how this victimization works and what signs to look for….

Who's actually victimized. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, gave a profile of what he described as a fairly typical victim of online predation: "Jenna" was 13 and "from a divorced family, frequented sex-oriented chatrooms, had the screenname 'Evilgirl.' There she met a guy who, after a number of conversations admitted he was 45. He flattered her, sent her gifts, jewelry. They talked about intimate things. And eventually he drove across several states to meet her for sex on several occasions in motel rooms. When he was arrested, in her company, she was reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement authorities" (see the full story). "Jenna" is not a typical teen or social networker; she's a typical victim of online predation, a high-risk teen offline, representing somewhere between 2% and 5% of online teens, Dr. Finkelhor indicated in a recent briefing on Capitol Hill.

Social networking's very individual. Whether it's a positive or negative experience depends on who uses it. The vast majority of our online kids are for the most part using social sites to socialize with their friends at school. Some are decorating their pages and learning graphic design, writing software code, playing with digital photos, producing and editing video, and so on, all in a very collective way. Unfortunately, some teens are seeking the wrong kind of validation online for destructive behaviors such as eating disorders, cutting, and substance abuse. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us over a year ago that MySpace was its No. 1 source of referrals, so teens are also getting help in MySpace for depression, domestic violence, loneliness, and substance abuse, as well as suicidal thinking, through the work of 120 crisis centers nationwide whose work the Lifeline coordinates.

Cyberbullying affects a lot more teens. So far two nationwide surveys in the US have found that about one-third of online teens in this country have been victimized by cyberbullying (one in Canada put the figure at about two-thirds for Canadian kids!). That's at least 8 million young people in the US (this too in "Predators vs. cyberbullies"). This peer harassment needs to be addressed, which will certainly happen at home and in school, as we teach our kids to be good friends and "citizens" online as well as off.

So let's keep these scary predator announcements in perspective. We want parents to have the facts so they can remain calm. When parents (and officials) overreact and start banning things, kids just go underground - as they have since the beginning of time. Only now they can do so online too - on hundreds of social networking sites, in IM, on phones and all sorts of other devices and at proliferating connection points in parks, libraries, cafes, and at friends' houses.

Related links

As of this writing, there were more than 600 links in Google News to coverage in multiple countries of the North Carolina attorney general's announcement. That was just the start. The story has continued to unfold, so here's a sampler of coverage:

"Multi-front predator battle" - The Washington Post goes in-depth on the different aspects of this effort, including 10 states' new legislation requiring sex offenders to register their email addresses and what's involved at MySpace to catch offenders on the site.

Parental-permission piece dropped. North Carolina state legislators deleted from a proposed bill a requirement that the state's teens "get their parents' permission before signing up for social-networking sites like MySpace, saying it raised constitutional questions that couldn't be addressed," the Charlotte Observer reports.

Closer look at parental verification. Here's an audio discussion (podcast) on "The Pitfalls of Age Verification" by tech-public-policy experts Tim Lee, Braden Cox, and Adam Thierer. Cox and Thierer testified before the NC legislature on this subject. Here, too, is Advertising Age on this subject.

A twist in the UK. "Convicted sex offenders should not be prevented from using social networking sites such as MySpace, Scotland Yard said yesterday," The Times Online reported. The UK police agency's spokesperson said, “Just because you’re a convicted offender doesn’t mean you’re still offending,” a spokeswoman said. “Why would we pursue them in this way? These are people who have served their time.”

China's take. "MySpace weeds out 29,000 sex offender profiles," Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

Canadian view. "MySpace kicks out sex offenders - but not in Canada" at Canada.com

MySpace's view. "MySpace defends efforts to vet sex offenders" in InformationWeek

AG looks at Facebook. An anonymous person who said he or she was "a concerned parent" contacted the New York Times about a fake teen profile he (we'll make it "he" to simplify) created apparently to check into the predator risk on Facebook, the Times reports. The Times put this account into an article that led with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's announcement that "investigators in his state were looking into three or more' cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook." The Times added that "Mr. Blumenthal said he was taking a particular interest in Facebook because his children use the service."

Online victimization: Facts emerging

It was great to see the Associated Press's "Net threats result of kids' online behavior." It means newspapers and broadcast media worldwide just may run this story, and more parents will be getting facts instead of scary messages based on ignorance, politics, well-intentioned guesswork. Here are some facts we have now:

Fact No. 1: Posting personal info online isn't actually what makes kids most vulnerable to predators. "Rather, victimization is more likely to result from … talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet," the AP reports. The first form of aggressive behavior - talking about sex with strangers online - is about predation, the second about harassing or cyberbullying, which affects a great many more teens (about one-third of all online youth, according to the latest Pew/Internet study - see this).

Fact No. 2: "Online victims tend to be teens with troubles offline, such as poor relationships with parents, loneliness and depression" (see "Profile of a teen online victim"). The kids most at risk online are already risk-seekers and -takers in real life.

Fact No. 3: A lot of sexual-victimization cases happen at the hands of peers, not adults, the AP reports, citing the work of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. It also cites a 2004 study by the CACRC finding that, even when offenders are adults, they "generally aren't strangers, and pedophiles aren't luring unsuspecting children by pretending to be a peer."

Certainly nobody's saying kids should completely relax about posting personal info about themselves. It's common sense that the more discreet they are the less info there'll be to use against them. But the reality is, sharing - thoughts, media, experiences - is what today's very social, user-driven Web is all about, and a lot of parents can breathe easier knowing that posting personal info online is not as high-risk as once thought.

So what we are saying is that it's time to look at the facts we now have and adjust our child-protection strategies accordingly at home, in schools, and in policymaking. We need to…

…think of our online kids less as victims and more as participants on the participatory Web, of which they are the key drivers.

…think more in terms of online citizenship than online safety. Good citizenship includes safety; knowing that aggressive behavior puts kids at risk, we see that ethical behavior protects them.

When Web participants become cybercitizens, with a sense of responsibility toward fellow participants and their collective space, the social Web will be a safer, better place for everyone on it.

Related links

• The study the AP refers to, published last February in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine: "Internet Prevention Messages: Targeting the Right Online Behaviors," by Michele L. Ybarra, Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak
  
• "New approach to online safety suggested," by SafeKids.com's Larry Magid, posted in BlogSafety.com 2/10/07
  
• "Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights"
  
• "Profile of a teen online victim"
  
• "Predators vs. cyberbullies"
  
• "Responsible social networking: Mounting evidence"
  
• "Net-related crimes against kids"

Grown up cyberbullying & spin control

We’re hearing more and more about the teenage, queen-bee-wannabe kind, but adults are certainly not immune to cyberbullying – not on the user-driven Web, where defamation can happen to anybody, whether a parent or a public figure. The Washington Post describes some particularly tough examples and the reputation-management providers they’ve turned to. “Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don't promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.”

Of course these organizations help with teenagers’ reputations too, but let’s hope it won’t come to this potentially costly fix for them. What these services do is something a lot of people can do for themselves with a little bit of time – put a little positive p.r. out there on the Web about themselves (such as a blog or social-networking profile or two or three to which good friends can post supportive comments to) that search-engine crawlers can find too. I’ve mentioned this in the past, the perhaps unfortunate but growing need to learn and teach our kids how to do our/their own spin control. It seems the choices are becoming 1) stay very anonymous and private online, 2) be less private and more spin-savvy, or 3) be very public and either spend a lot of time spin-doctoring our own reputations or a lot of money paying professionals to do it. Most young people will probably fall somewhere around No. 2 or will be in denial, think they’re in category No. 1, and occasionally need a little spin-doctor help, whether amateur or professional.

Cyberethics training needed

“She was a little big for her age, her face still chubby and prepubescent,” writes ZooeysRoom.com’s Kaley Noonen in Edutopia.org. “She pulled me aside after the cyberbullying workshop I'd just given to a room full of 20 middle school girls. She looked as though she were hiding something. ‘Would you help me get my MySpace page shut down?’ she asked.” The girl explained to Kaley that an ex-friend had used her password to hijack her MySpace profile and proceed to bully her by posting “all kinds of malicious [sex-related] lies” about the girl on it.

As hard as that is to read, anecdotes like Kaley’s and so many others from teens, reporters, and other experts are not unusual. Then there’s…

The brand-new finding from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that some 8 million US 12-to-17-year-olds have been bullied (see this issue).

The recent finding from the Crimes Against Children Research Center about the fine line between bullying an victimization: “Youth who engage in online aggressive behavior making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization” (see this summary), and…

All this points to a serious and growing need for ethics training. Kaley quotes a 2005 Pew/Internet study that found girls are “now considered the ‘power users’ of online communication tools. This kind of power needs to be tempered by ethics training. You wouldn't give a 16-year-old girl a chainsaw without warning her of its dangers, yet with a keystroke, many girls are capable of carving up names, reputations, even entire lives with cheerful indifference.”

At the end of his 10-part Internet-safety series, author, public-policy expert, and dad Adam Thierer writes that “one of the most important parenting responsibilities involves teaching our children basic manners and rules of social etiquette.” Helping them apply those basics in their online experiences is equally important, he suggests, offering eight “sensible rules” for online behavior. Rule No. 1 is “Treat others you meet online with the same respect that you would accord them in person.”

Kaley takes it a step further when she teaches middle-schoolers what empathy means – with a real-time demo of their own completely non-empathetic reactions to a photo of Britney Spears with her head shaved and dark circles under her eyes (see the article for those heartless reactions).

One thing is clear: If we don’t want our children to be victimized themselves, we need to talk with them about treating people online the way they would to their faces, and if someone else is cruel online, not to make the situation worse by participating. Note one high school student’s intelligent attitude:

"’I've heard of [cyberbullying] and experienced it. People think they are a million times stronger because they can hide behind their computer monitor.’ This student called them ‘e-thugs,’ while displaying his own maturity about the practice: ‘Basically I just ignored the person and went along with my own civilized business’.” [This is on p. 5 of the Pew/Internet report, also quoted in InternetNews.com’s coverage.]

More on this

The latest numbers: My summary two weeks ago of the Pew Internet & American Life Project's just-released study on cyberbullying in the US, based on both a survey of and focus groups with teenagers.

Cyberbullying's seriousness. In a commentary at MSNBC, Helen Popkin suggests we need to come out of denial about cyberbullying’s seriousness, especially when dealing with not-yet-fully-developed teenage brains. But we also need to acknowledge, she suggests, that this new/old social ill is certainly not “owned” by teens – and she’s right. There is a lot of ugly online harassment being committed by adult bullies too, male and female.

An adult’s-eye-view of social-networking etiquette at The Times of London: Note No. 8 in writer Jack Malvern’s “A Guide to Internet Manners” at the bottom: “The golden rule for Facebook Etiquette is the same as for manners generally. Manners mean how we behave in society. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. And this does not mean having to admit every unknown Tom, Dick and Harriet to your friendship.”

Mobile bullying across the pond – one in five 11-to-19-year-olds in the UK have been bullied either via phone or the Internet, the BBC reports.

Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights

About a third (32%) of US online teens, or some 8 million kids, have been cyberbullied - girls more than boys (38% vs. 26%) and older girls more than younger ones (41% aged 15-17 vs. 34% aged 12-14). That’s according to a national survey the Pew Internet & American Life Project just released. Interestingly, despite all we hear about Internet-based harassment, the respondents told Pew they’re more likely to be bullied offline than online. More than two-thirds (67%) of the 12-to-17-year-olds Pew/Internet surveyed said that, while 29% said bullying happens more online, and 3% online and offline equally (I probably would’ve been among the 3% saying it was both), bullying and harassment happen more offline than online.

The study found that the online version of harassment, “depending on the circumstances,” can fall anywhere on the annoyance spectrum from “relatively benign” to “truly threatening.” Toward the more damaging end of this Richter scale are tactics like “receiving threatening messages, having private emails or text messages forwarded without [one’s] consent; having an embarrassing picture posted without [one’s] permission; or having rumors about them spread online.” The most common tactic experienced among the four Pew asked its respondents about was “someone taking a private email, IM, or text message you sent them and forwarding it to someone else or posting it where others could see it,” for example in a profile or blog.

Pew/Internet asked the teens why people bully online, and they gave four basic answers: that the Net is just another venue for a fact of adolescent life, the convenience and access technology provides, the anonymity of the Net that encourages bullying (psychologists call this “disinhibition”), and the intolerance that fuels bullying. In this digital age, study author Amanda Lenhart writes, “the impulses behind [bullying] are the same, but the effect is magnified.” We’re of course talking about sites with millions of members where the “publisher” loses control of the content the minute it’s “published,” which means the damage can be broader in scope and can last much longer (see social media researcher danah boyd’s view on this in the bullets below).

In addition to the phone survey, Pew/Internet conducted focus groups with teens. Parents might want to note one of the anecdotes shared by a 15-year-old boy in one of the groups: “I played a prank on someone but it wasn’t serious…. I told them I was going to come take them from their house and kill them and throw them in the woods. It’s the best prank because it’s like ‘oh my god, I’m calling the police’ and I was like ‘I’m just kidding, I was just messing with you.’ She got so scared though.” A 16-year-old New York boy was recently arrested and pleaded guilty for making a similar threat online concerning a teacher (see below).

One of the most important online safeguards for youth going forward is critical thinking – thinking through the implications of their actions online so they can avoid embarrassment, victimization, and even arrest for actions that never saw the light of day when we were kids!

Related links

What’s different online: In an interview with Alternet.org last winter, social media researcher danah boyd (who prefers her name lower-cased) explained what’s different about socializing (and bullying) online: “persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence - what you say sticks around. Searchability - my mother would have loved the ability to sort of magically scream into the ether to figure out where I was when I'd gone off to hang out with my friends. She couldn’t, thank God. But today when kids are hanging out online because they've written [themselves] into being online, they become very searchable. Replicability - you have a conversation with your friends, and this can be copied and pasted into your Live Journal and you get into a tiff. That creates an amazing amount of ‘uh ohs’ when you add it to persistence. And finally, invisible audiences. In an unmediated environment, you can look around and have an understanding of who can possibly overhear you. You adjust what you're saying to the reactions of those people. You figure out what is appropriate to say, you understand the social context. But when we're dealing with mediated environments, we have no way of gauging who might hear or see us, not only because we can't tell whose presence is lurking at the moment, but because of persistence and searchability.”

On disinhibition: “Social intelligence & youth”

Online threats: The New York teen who made threats against a teacher in a YouTube video.

The survey’s URL again: “Cyberbullying & Online Teens”

A sampler of the worldwide coverage of this study: NewKerala.com in India, The Times in the UK, ElectricNews.net in Ireland, and the AP at CNN in New York.

Phone monitoring on steroids

It's a little chilling, but maybe some parents feel they need to go to these lengths to protect their cellphone-using chilling. I can see parents using a product like this openly as a tool for solving a cyberbullying problem that might include calls and text message to a child’s cellphone. It’s called Flexispy, and it’s downloadable monitoring software for cellphones. The Thailand-based company's tagline is "Protect Your Children. Catch Cheating Spouses." According to its press release, the software “has already been used successfully worldwide to bring to light to extramarital affairs, disloyal employee activities, and to protect children from predators and SMS [phone text] bullying. It "runs invisibly in the background and can only be accessed using a secret code." Flexispy Light "automatically records all incoming & outgoing SMS messages, calls, emails and tracks the device location" and uploads all this to a Web site the "spy" can access. The "pro" version does all that and offers "the ability to secretly switch the phone’s microphone on from any other phone; thereby listening into the target’s surroundings."

Bullying made easy

University of Michigan student Emmarie spent “countless hours” as a teenager “justifying [her] online journal to her parents,” she writes in her university’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. They didn’t understand why she wanted to make her private thoughts so public, but she said it made her “feel connected knowing that someone knew my exact mood at that moment … and my side of the latest gossip.” But then the gossip turned against her. “By giving adolescents the opportunity to voice their opinions in public - an opportunity once reserved for the supposedly more responsible members of the media - the Internet has allowed them to elevate high school drama to a tabloid-like level of sophistication,” writes Emmarie, who is the paper’s associate editorial page writer this summer. “Worse still,” she adds, “there's a degree of suspended reality involved in Internet communication. Without face-to-face interaction, we can't actually experience the consequences of our words, making it easy to hurt others without a second thought.” You may be interested in her conclusion.

Extreme cyberbullying: 2 cases

By “extreme,” I mean bullying that has led to teen suicide attempts. Two such cases involving three New Zealand girls have come to my attention in the past week – one through our BlogSafety forum and the other covered in that country’s national news media.

The Sunday News in NZ reported this week that two 15-year-old secondary-school students were tricked by another girl into believing two teenage boys whose online profiles she’d created with scanned photos of magazine models had become their online boyfriends. The scam was discovered by the mother of one of the victims, according to the Sunday News, when she “found a scalpel under her daughter's mattress and an email on the teen's computer from her ‘boyfriend,’ instructing her how to kill herself.” When the mother called the imaginary boyfriend’s cellphone number, she found it belonged to the bully’s mother. The girl had conducted these online “relationships” with her victims for 10 months, the Sunday News reports, even going so far as to send both victims a number of gifts from the “boyfriends,” “including flowers, teddy bears and T-shirts.” This peer-to-peer grooming process culminated in an unfulfilled suicide pact between the two victims, the Sunday News.

My awareness of the second case started with this post in the forum: “Four weeks ago, my daughter, in a weak moment, attempted suicide because she was grieving a boy that she had met and communicated with” online and via phone texting. The mother, Karen, later emailed me a copy of her full story, detailed in a letter to New Zealand’s Health Ministry (published here, with her permission). The “boy,” she wrote, was - as in the Sunday News case – imaginary, the creation of another teenage girl, who enlisted the help of another friend to create the profile of this imaginary surfer sponsored by Rip Curl and named “Ben.”

I had read many posts about imposter profiles created about real people; this was the first I’d heard of profiles created about fake people – yet another kind of cyberbullying.

But that’s not the worst of the story. Before this experience, Karen wrote, three young people in their small community had been lost to car accidents and suicide, one a friend of the family. Then this past January “Ben” committed suicide while texting her daughter, Karen wrote. “Sophie [who believed he was a real person] was obviously desperate and was furiously trying to call him and text him, telling him not to do it … to no avail…. On asking Sophie more about this boy, she proceeded to tell me that he had suffered from depression, partly because he had witnessed a previous girlfriend hang herself, and that [another girl] had swallowed razor blades a few months before…. This was Sophie’s reality.” I’ll leave the full story to Karen.

If you're interested in my own take-aways from these cyberbullying cases, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Classified-ads abuse

This unnerving story could involve any classified-ads service on the social Web. A woman who apparently wanted to “get back at her aunt” for being unfair to her mother placed an ad in Craigslist.com “inviting the public to ‘come and take anything you want’ from the [aunt’s] house,” Scripps News reports. The public did, and the woman has been charged with “one count each of second-degree burglary, first-degree malicious mischief, and first-degree criminal impersonation in the incident.” Court documents say the person “had disliked the victim for years and was upset because the victim had evicted her mother from the house in question without letting her mother get her possessions.”

Social Web's complexity: Illustration

The story on WhosaRat.com, though not about youth, clearly illustrates how complicated the user-driven Web is. The site - whose mission is to out “rats” (informants or what judges call “cooperators”) by publishing court records – is a lot like a social-networking site. It “offers biographical information about people whom users identify as witnesses or undercover agents. Users can post court documents, comments and pictures,” the Associated Press reports. How hard it must be to tell who’s telling the truth about who, whether an “outing” is purely out of revenge - if the person behind a profile is really exposing a snitch or just bullying someone who did nothing wrong. The site says it’s “a resource for criminal defendants and does not condone violence.” For a very balanced examination of the site, don’t miss “Whosarat.com: Two views of outing witnesses” at NetworkWorld.com. It says – rightly, I think, regardless of who set it up and why – that “what … should be done about such sites ought to be a tough call for anyone interested in balancing the interests of law enforcement, witness protection and free speech.”

Consult 'Cyber-Safe Kids...'

There is no other tech-parenting manual you'll need besides Nancy Willard's Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. Please click to this week's issue of my newsletter to find out why.

Obama's MySpace: Lesson for teens?

What happened this week with Barack Obama’s MySpace profile could happen to anyone, and it’s a useful illustration for people trying to understand ways cyberbullying happens on the social Web. One way: A friend sets up a blog or profile for someone. The someone begins to feel that friend is misrepresenting her and suggests maybe she should take over her own profile. The profile creator takes offense because he feels he was so nice to set things up. He changes the password so the person the profile’s about can’t have access. Friends become ex-friends, and now the page is an imposter profile, where harassment and defamation can happen. It didn’t get that bad for Barack Obama, but his campaign let some nice volunteer supporter in L.A. create the candidate’s profile and run it for more than two years, the Associated Press reports. It was pretty convincingly Obama, you can see from this amusing Los Angeles Times commentary about how the writer was getting way too many bulletins from Barack and had to delete the candidate from his Friends list. Probably not because of the L.A. Times piece but wisely, Obama’s campaign people were beginning to feel it was time to take control of the profile and asked the L.A. supporter/profile creator to hand over the password. You can read in the AP piece how a sticky situation seems to have been resolved fairly amicably – thanks to a personal call to the guy from Obama himself - but with Obama having to give up the 160,000 friends the supporter amassed for his MySpace profile while it was under the supporter’s control. That 160,000 was “about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed.” But by Wednesday evening, the Obama profile’s Friends count was back up to 20,000. In a bigger social-Web fracas this week, user-driven news site Digg.com experienced a user rebellion that could mire the site in litigation that would have the potential to put it out of business – see CBSNews.com.

Irresponsible sites: Web 2.0's other darkside

Worried parents may find some comfort in seeing the list of teen-safety improvements MySpace has made (see Business Week). But parents also must be aware that there are many social sites besides MySpace, some showing little to no corporate responsibility – if there are even corporations behind the latter type of site. Take for example EncyclopediaDramatica.com, a public wiki (mocking Wikipedia.org) where public and private individuals are being parodied and bullied. Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use emailed me and other child advocates this week about a person she'd heard from who'd been victimized in this site, which says in its disclaimer, "We take no responsibility for any of this." Not just the parody site it purports to be, it encourages trolling (inciting insults, flaming, bullying, defamation, etc.) and jokes about rape. Referring to this site and the page someone created about her, the person who emailed Nancy for help wrote, "There are hundreds of offensive and hurtful pages on there…. 99.9% of the information is obviously ridiculously false. What really kills me is the portrayal of my having been sexually assaulted as a big hilarious fabrication. That doesn't belong in my life…." For more on this, please see this week's issue of my newsletter.

How social sites can help kids

These might look like a couple of those rare boy-bites-dog stories, but I think the news media are beginning to pick up on a story that was always there. First, the Safe School Ambassadors Program uses social-networking techniques to combat bullying. It IDs social influencers in San Francisco schools, meets with them, and tells them that with influence comes responsibility. The premise is that if a school's top student influencers say bullying is not cool, a large number of other students "will change their behavior because they will have to conform to a new norm," a program spokesperson told San Francisco's CBS 5. More than 450 schools have used the Safe Schools Ambassadors program since 2000, CBS 5 adds. The other article from McClatchy Newspapers, points out that there is a lot to be learned about our kids from their profiles and blogs if we have access to them (which usually requires open parent-child communication lines), and social-networking profiles can present "very public warning signs from troubled kids" to parents, mental-health-care professionals, educators, and researchers.

A call to stop cyberbulllying

Death threats against prominent blogger Kathy Sierra have set off what looks to be an unprecedented Internet-wide protest against cyberbullying. It's a horrible way to raise awareness, but awareness has long been needed. I unconsciously previewed the news when I wrote "Predators vs. cyberbullies: A reality check" a couple of weeks ago. More recently, "when computer programmer and author Kathy Sierra began blogging about technology, she fully expected to see comments critical of her ideas. What she didn't anticipate were online posts advocating her murder or sexual assault against her," Business Week reports. Hundreds of bloggers have blogged their protests, and tech-education blogger Andy Carvin has called for this Friday to be Stop Cyberbullying Day and created not a new blog but a new social-networking site to mark the day. My thanks to friend, blogger, and tech educator Anne Bubnic for her heads-up on this.