'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.

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.

'Mean streets' of cyberspace

Most people online are "kind and supportive" and respectful community members, but there are some really nasty corners of the social Web, and Janet Kornblum zooms in on the why in a USATODAY article. She quotes Silicon Valley tech forecaster Paul Saffo as saying there are two ways to stand out among the online masses - to be really clever or really mean - and it's a lot easier, unfortunately, to be mean. Maybe it'll eventually help when people get it that " Anonymity on the Internet is relative…. People who use pseudonyms while posting on websites actually may be trackable through their Internet Protocol address, a unique designation that allows computers to communicate with others on the Internet. Still, most sites won't try to track someone unless there's a legal reason, such as a subpoena." Some of Janet's sources suggest that people need to start thinking about a code of online conduct, some say nothing can be done because human behavior won't change, and other say bloggers and profile owners just have to ignore the nastiness because it's a part of the participatory Web. What do you think? We'd love to see your thoughts at BlogSafety.com.