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Justin and I have just written a new fact sheet on Sexting, based on requests that we have received and feedback from previous blog posts. It first provides a definition we’ve crafted, and describes the phenomenon for the layreader. Then, we discuss two major cases that made national attention before reviewing the current state of research. Here, we have shared new numbers from our most recent (Spring 2010) data collection endeavor, and have broken participation down by age and gender. If you’re interested in other distributions, please let us know and we can run the analysis for you. By the way, we’ll further flesh out our sexting data in a forthcoming manuscript.

After summarizing existing studies on the problem, we detail informal and formal responses – particularly from legal and political authorities – and describe what schools can do as it relates to policy and response efforts. Finally, the fact sheet suggests some practical prevention strategies that educators can implement to reduce the occurrence and perceived acceptability of sexting among students. To note, we’ve previously discussed the role of multidisciplinary response teams here.  Definitely let us know your thoughts about this new fact sheet – we are really interested in hearing them!

Sameer and I recently wrote a concise “Student Guide to Personal Publishing” which was published by Jostens (the class ring and yearbook company).  They contacted us looking for information they could provide to students, parents, and educators about being safe and responsible when publishing material both online and off.  While we regularly discuss these issues in our presentations, we didn’t have anything written that could be easily distributed.  Now we do.  Feel free to download the guide and distribute it far and wide.  As always, if you have any comments, thoughts, or feedback, let us know.

There has been a lot of talk about improving school climate recently, in line with the U. S. Department of Education’s new focus for public schools across the nation (and their Safe and Supportive Schools initiative). I have recently discussed it in January at a NCPC summit, and covered it briefly two weeks ago while at the Bullying Summit in DC, but I’d like to expand on it for our readers. As a starting point, though, I need to provide a foundational backdrop. We’ll explore climate and cyberbullying in great detail over the upcoming months.

To begin, Welsh, Greene, and Jenkins (1999) have defined school climate as “the unwritten beliefs, values, and attitudes that become the style of interaction between students, teachers, and administrators…[it] sets the parameters of acceptable behavior among all school actors, and it assigns individual and institutional responsibility for school safety.” While that is a bit academic and wordy, I feel that it conveys what is meant. Basically, we are talking about the quality of life for students and staff on campus.

The benefits of a positive school climate have been identified through much research over the last thirty years. It contributes to attendance, student achievement, and other desirable student outcomes. Improving climate on school grounds has also been linked to improvements in student behavior – such as a decreased peer-on-peer bullying and an increase in perceived and actual safety.

In a recent study we conducted, students who experienced cyberbullying (both those who were victims and those who admitted to cyberbullying others) perceived a poorer climate or culture at their school than those who had not experienced cyberbullying. Youth were asked a variety of questions, such as if they “enjoy going to school,” “feel safe at school,” “feel that teachers at their school really try to help them succeed,” and “feel that teachers at their school care about them.” Those who admitted to cyberbullying others or who were the target of cyberbullying were less likely to agree with those statements.

We are continuing to explore this relationship, and believe strongly in efforts to enhance climate in schools across the nation. There are very practical ways to do this, and we’ll discuss them in forthcoming blog entries.

References:

Gottfredson, G. D., & Gottfredson, D. G. (1989). School climate, academic performance, attendance, and dropout. North Charleston, SC: Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Haynes, N. M., Emmons, C., & Ben-Avie, M. (1997). School climate as a factor in student adjustment and achievement. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 9, 321-329.

Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2009). Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications (Corwin Press).

Nansel, T. R., Overpeck, M., Pilla, R. S., Ruan, W. J., Simons-Morton, B., & Scheidt, P. (2001). Bullying behaviors among U.S. youth: Prevalence and association with psychosocial adjustment. Journal of the American Medical Association, 285(16), 2094-2100.

Rigby, K. (1996). Bullying in schools: And what to do about it. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Stover, D. (2005). Climate and Culture: Why your board should pay attention to the attitudes of students and staff. American School Board Journal, 192(12).

Welsh, W. N. (2000). The effects of school climate on school disorder. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 567, 88-107.

I was recently walking around with a friend and saw a girl (who looked to be around nine years of age) wearing a shirt that proclaimed “Born to be SEXY” – which caught me off guard.  Not to be a prude, but it bothers me that cultural messaging strategies continue to induce girls to think of themselves primarily (or even partially) as a commodity that can possibly (or actually) sexually benefit others.  I think that this is problematic even if a grown woman is wearing it.  Justin and I have seen anecdotally through screenshots collected by our research team as they scour Facebook and MySpace that girls who present themselves in line with this message seem to have more online “friends,” and receive more Wall posts and comments on their profiles.  This attention and feedback consequently reinforces and promotes the behavior, and provides the affirmation and validation that we are all looking for and hoping to receive – albeit in different ways.  The major concern I (and many others) have is that feelings of self-worth and identity will be tied somewhat exclusively into physical attractiveness and sexual exploration/experimentation.  This, as psychological research has shown, may lead to future victimization – or, at least, unhealthy and even exploitative attraction and interest from boys and men.  The APA Report on the Sexualization of Girls details this phenomenon in a fascinating writeup, and our colleague Rachel Simmons discussed it recently on her blog.  I was curious if any of our readership has been unsettled by similar observations, and would love to hear some balanced thoughts on this issue.

Back in March I wrote about this case, where a federal jury had ordered the Hudson Area School District in Michigan to pay $800,000 in damages to a student who was repeatedly harassed by classmates (and allegedly staff) for a period of several years.  A federal district court had been reviewing the facts of the case and recently overturned the jury’s order, stating that the harassment the student experienced was not sexual in nature and therefore not subject to a Title IX claim.  This despite being called a “queer” and “faggot” on a regular basis and his locker being “covered with shaving cream spelling out sexually oriented words.”  The court also asserted that the plaintiff failed to prove that the school was deliberately indifferent to the harassment that had been taking place.

There are a couple of important lessons that can be learned from this case.  First, holding incompetent school officials accountable for their actions, or lack thereof, can be very difficult.  To be fair, we were not present during the hearings and do not have access to all of the evidence presented.  From court records, however, it seemed clear to me that school officials were ignorant at best and most likely indifferent.  Obviously Federal Circuit Judge Lawrence Zatkoff didn’t agree with me.  Please read the facts of the case here and assess for yourself.

Second, it is important that students who are bullied keep very detailed records about what happened, what they did in response, who they told, and what that person did to fix the problem.  Targets of bullying also may need to fully exhaust all school-level mechanisms for responding to the bullying.  They need to give the school a chance to make things right.  School officials too need to keep very good records pertaining to bullying incidents so that they can articulate the steps that were taken to demonstrate, as apparently the Hudson Area School District did, that they took appropriate actions to remedy the problem.

School officials cannot become complacent and assume that there is zero liability if they ignore bullying that affects their learning environment and interferes with the rights of students to feel safe at school. Our colleague Nancy Willard pointed us to a couple of examples: In Vance v. Spencer County Public School District (2000), a jury ordered the school to pay the target of student-on-student sexual harassment $220,000.  In a similar case (Theno v. Tonganoxi Unified School District, 2005), another jury ordered the school district to pay the target $250,000 for being deliberately indifferent to, once again, student-on-student sexual harassment occurring at school.  Both of these cases involved sexual harassment that occurred at school and both involved jury orders.  Common citizens could clearly see that the schools in these cases were irresponsible, indifferent, and should have done more to protect students.  Interestingly, the facts of the Theno case are very similar to the Patterson case, especially with respect to the names that the target was being called.

If we have learned anything from all of these cases, it is that this is a legal area that is far from clear.  What do you think?  Were staff members at the Hudson Area School District indifferent to the harassment?