There is no better source on cyberbullying than the Cyberbullying Research Center, at least in the US. And this month, for National Bullying Prevention Month in the US, CRC, in partnership with Cartoon Network, released data on a whole new group of kids: 9-to-12-year-olds.
It may surprise you that we know very little about tweens’ experiences with cyberbullying. But that’s because of COPPA, the Children’s Online Protection Act, which in effect (not technically) created a “minimum age” for youth “social networking.” So research, not very helpfully, has focused largely on young people aged 13+.
That just changed, to the credit of these research partners. Profs. Justin Patchin and Sameer Hinduja of the CRC surveyed a “nationally representative sample of 1,034 tweens (9-to-12-year-olds).” Here are my highlights from their top takeaways, with a few thoughts of my own from following CRC’s and other researchers’ findings through the years….
LOW NUMBERS COMPARED TO TEENS
First and foremost, it’s good to know that the numbers, though always concerning, are more instructive than alarming. Only 14.5% of tweens said they’d been cyberbullied, while a great many more, half, of them said they’d been bullied at school, according to Cartoon Network’s report on the survey. And the number in this age group who’ve experienced cyberbullying is significantly lower than for teens, 36.5% of whom had been cyberbullied, according to the CRC’s latest data on teens (Dr. Patchin did tell me they put the tweens survey questions a bit differently). The tweens-to-teens discrepancy probably has something to do with the fact that younger kids socialize online a bit less, Patchin agreed.
“I also think it relates to the developmental stage: Tweens are generally still more bonded to parents, whereas teens are more influenced by peers,” he told me, which suggests parents can move the numbers down even further by seeing that cyberbullying is more about how people treat each other than about technology. Working with our kids on the former long before they use tech can have real impact.
OTHER TOP TAKEAWAYS
TIPS FOR PARENTS & EDUCATORS
The sooner we start talking with our children about all things social the better. This is so not just about cyberbullying or how we treat each other online. It’s about how we are with each other anywhere – at home, at school, in a game online or on the field, in an app or in the ‘hood, right? No differences. I strongly suspect there isn’t a single parent or teacher reading this who didn’t start working on this with the children when they were very little. All of that is the best possible foundation for playing and socializing online too – just add digital. It just needs to be part of conversations about “how the people in our family treat others” (see this about the power of a strong family narrative around “who we are as a family,” online and offline). But if your child comes to you about being harassed or bullied online, here are some tips for that, inspired by a section about this in the Cartoon Network report:
About that “work together” point: One thing I learned from the research, specifically findings by Prof. Ian Rivers in the UK, is that the powerlessness, or helplessness, that young people feel when they experience or even witness bullying is “the single most significant predictor of suicide risk” and mental health problems. Our primary job, especially in a time of rising depression and anxiety among youth, is to support our children’s agency – their self-confidence and capacity to change things for the better – the exact opposite of the helplessness that comes from bullying.
RELATED LINKS
This blog originally was published on October 15, 2020 on NetFamilyNews.org. View the original article at this link.
A writer and youth advocate, Anne Collier has been chronicling the public discussion about youth and digital media since 1997. She is founder and executive director of national nonprofit organization The Net Safety Collaborative (TNSC), which runs NetFamilyNews, and piloted a social media helpline for schools in California in 2016. The project was recognized by the National School Boards Association as one of 6 startups in its Education Technology Innovation Showcase. That year Anne also gave her TEDx talk, “The Heart of Digital Citizenship,” at the ITU’s World Summit on Information Technology in Geneva, Switzerland. She serves on the trust & safety advisory boards of Meta, Roblox and YouTube, based in the US, and Teleperformance and Yubo, based in France. She also advises investors in tech innovation that support youth mental health and wellbeing.
Anne has served on three national task forces on youth and Internet safety, including as co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, which delivered its report to Congress, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet,” in June 2010, and the national Internet Safety Technical Task Force of 2008 at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. In 2013-’14 she served on the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning & the Internet.In 2011 and ’12, she was a member of the curriculum working group that helped launch Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University. For the Foundation’s launch, Anne collaborated on several papers for the Foundation and Berkman Klein Center’s Kinder & Braver World Project. She also helped develop the foundation’s inaugural Youth Advisory Board.
Anne has collaborated with scholars on a number of academic journal articles, most recently “Leveraging Dignity Theory to Understand Bullying, Cyberbullying, and Children’s Rights,” led by researchers at Dublin’s Anti-Bullying Center. Books she has contributed to include Children’s Privacy and Safety (IAPP, 2022), Bullying: Perspectives, Practice and Insights (Council of Europe Publishing, 2017), Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Cyberbullying Prevention and Response: Expert Perspectives (Routledge, 2011). From 2017 to 2020, she worked with Google on its “Be Internet Awesome” safety and citizenship curriculum for elementary students worldwide. With tech journalist Larry Magid, she co-authored MySpace Unraveled (Peachpit Press, 2006), the first parents’ guide to teen social networking, and a number of guides for parents published by ConnectSafely, which she co-founded and co-directed with Magid for nearly a decade. In 2009, they co-authored and published “Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth.”
Anne has spoken widely on Internet safety myth-busting and the literacies that afford true safety online as well as offline in a digital age. Between 2011 and ’14, she helped spearhead and facilitate workshops on digital-age citizenship for young people from many countries at Internet Governance Forums in Vilnius, Nairobi, Baku and Istanbul. She appeared on PBS Frontline’s “Growing Up Online” (2008); has been heard on public radio and nationally syndicated commercial radio in many states; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Business Week, the Associated Press, and many other publications.
In addition to her industry advisory work, she serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), the Advisory Board of the Young & Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University and the Global Advisory Board of youth-driven nonprofit Project Rockit in Melbourne. She has also worked closely with fellow youth-focused nonprofits the Family Online Safety Institute, Committee for Children, the International Bullying Prevention Association and the University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Lab and ServiceSpace.org. Prior to working in the Internet safety field, Anne worked on print, radio, TV, and Web editions of the Christian Science Monitor, having served as editor of its first Web site in the mid-’90s.A Massachusetts native, Anne holds B.A. and M.A. degrees and currently resides in Salt Lake City.
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