• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Teens’ digital self-abuse: New insight

December 16, 2010 By Anne 5 Comments

A just-published observation by social media researcher danah boyd is important for two reasons I can think of right now: 1) it strongly confirms the importance of adults not reacting too quickly to “cyberbullying” incidents or of not acting without calm communication and investigation, and 2) it starts an important discussion about the online versions of self-destructive behavior. Let’s look at the second one first:

Is it technically ‘self-harm’?

Referring to “digital self-harm” – as in the digital version of cutting, for example – boyd relates that Formspring.me, a social Q&A site, had contacted her about a troubling discovery it had made. The staff had been trying to figure out how to deal with harassment among teen users and discovered that “a number of vicious questions were posted by
the Formspring account owners themselves,” boyd writes. “They appeared on Formspring as anonymous but they were written by the owner while logged into their own account.”

Two commenters to boyd’s post who sound like they know what they’re talking about (one who says she used to engage in physical self-harm), object to the term “self-harm” – the first (“Meg”) because she says self-harm is not a cry for help, as danah suggests (and as the Formspring self-abuse seems to be); rather, Meg says, it’s the only way some people (whose “coping mechanisms are overwhelmed”) know how to relieve the pressure and pain and “control at least one thing in their life” (she says “the physical pain [releases] … chemicals that genuinely do make you feel better”). Digital self-abuse can’t replace that, it appears, but it can do other things. The other, “quinn,” says, interestingly: “It might have something to do with self-criticism as defense measure: [as in] ‘if I’ve already said everything horrible that can be said, no one can use those things to hurt me’ – a teenage version of ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’.”

But a third commenter, a police officer (who wrote boyd privately and gave her permission to post his note), reinforces one of boyd’s explanations for this self-abusive behavior, if not her term for it: He’d been called in to help with the investigation of a series of threatening notes left on a student’s desk. “Upon very close examination of the notes, it became apparent to me that our victim was the one who was writing the notes. The positive to all of this was that a troubled girl now got the attention and help that she needed.”

Please see boyd’s post for the other two fascinating explanations she offers for the behavior, but the first one, which seems to be what the police officer’s story bears out, is “a cry for help. Teens want their parents (and perhaps others in their lives) to notice them and pay attention to them, support them and validate them. They want these people to work diligently to stop the unstoppable but, more importantly, to spend time focused on helping them.” Which leads to my first point: why it’s so important that we not respond reflexively to what we see of our children’s online experiences – and especially not overreact – because we may not be seeing a complete picture or wholly factual representation.

Important to respond thoughtfully

So here’s further confirmation that not all bullying messages kids receive online are from other kids. We also know from Dr. Sonia Livingstone’s research in the UK that teens sometimes fictionalize parts of their profiles and other online content (see this). We might also see the online version of normative “acting out” or claiming (see this and this), or a peer group’s genuine inside joke that only looks disturbing to outsiders. Being able to see these things can be disturbing but it’s also a great gift to parents and others who want to help and now have information or talking points for helping teens going through a difficult time in their lives.

I love what boyd writes to parents about this: “Supporting your daughter or son is not simply about finding the bully and prosecuting them or about going after their parents. Teens who are the victims of bullying – whether by a stranger, a peer, or themselves – are often in need of support, love, validation, and, most of all, healthy attention. I can’t tell you how many teens I’ve met who’ve been bullied by people at school who then turn to tell me about how their parents are absent – physically, mentally, or emotionally. And how often I hear teens complain about their parents trying to ‘fix’ things by getting involved in all the wrong ways. Ways that make the dynamics around bullying so much worse.” Think about it: When that happens, parents are increasing the very victimization they want to stop! When they act in anger, they’re also in danger of modeling bullying behavior for the kids involved, sending conflicting messages.

When our children are suffering, we naturally want to stop the hurt as fast as possible, and so we reject complexity and seek quick fixes or formulaic solutions. The thing is, though, very often the process of really communicating with our kids, open-mindedly getting to the bottom of what’s going on, and listening a lot is what helps our children the most.

Related links

  • To give you a feel for the level of interest in Formspring internationally: This past year, “Formspring” was the fastest-rising Google search term in three countries: Australia, the UK, and Brazil (which always seems to be at the cutting edge of social media – see this).
  • “Self-injurers on the social Web”
  • “1 in 6 self-injure”
  • “Formspring: What’s going on around it?”
  • “Formspring: What’s really going on?”
Share Button

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: danah boyd, digital self-harm, Formspring, online safety, Parenting, self-harm

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. ‘It’s Complicated’: Parents get a teen view of social media | parentsonline.co.uk says:
    March 5, 2014 at 2:53 pm

    […] happening at home or in the hopes that their parents might notice,” says boyd. For examples, see this story about boyd’s pioneering work on this subject, and this story for the latest tragic […]

    Reply
  2. Social cruelty on Ask.fm & the whack-a-mole tendency | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    February 26, 2014 at 7:08 am

    […] about a subtle kind of self-harm the staff had detected, and the site and the researcher started an important discussion about teens' cries for help through staging anonymous bullying behavior against […]

    Reply
  3. Nothing complicated about this: Read 'It's Complicated'! - NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    February 25, 2014 at 11:16 am

    […] happening at home or in the hopes that their parents might notice” (for examples, see this about her work on […]

    Reply
  4. 'Am I pretty?' videos by teens | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    November 1, 2012 at 12:56 am

    […] of the late-’90s or similar questions asked more recently in text form in Formspring.me (see “Teens’ digital self-abuse: New insight”), but this is not new adolescent behavior, online or offline. So I asked Dr. Gowen what she […]

    Reply
  5. Don't hype sexting risks to teens: Study | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    September 21, 2012 at 1:17 am

    […] anxiety, dating violence and of ’self-cyberbullying’” or digital self-harm (see this), which Englander describes as “taking on false roles to pretend to cyberbully themselves and […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.