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At the Cyberbullying Research Center we strive to approach the issue of teen technology use and misuse from a data-informed perspective. Just to be clear, data doesn’t just mean bar charts. Over the last ten years we have formally surveyed over 12,000 middle and high school students, so yes, we have a lot of bar charts. But we have also spoken to thousands of teens in schools all around the United States (and abroad). We get emails and phone calls daily from teens, parents, educators, and others who care about the online behaviors of young people. We have done focused interviews with small groups of students. We also review research articles written by other scholars (both published and unpublished). All of these are valuable sources of data. Taken together, we can start to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what is really going on.

Some data sources are definitely better than others, and we take into consideration the quality of the source and the sophistication of the methodology when interpreting results. Randomly selecting participants from a known sample is much better, for example, than arbitrarily selecting people who happen to be at a particular place and time.

To illustrate, I was recently at a school where a teacher told me that *every* student at her school that she had talked to had “either seen or engaged in sexting.” When pressed, she admitted that this wasn’t a “scientific survey,” just a questioning of a few of the students coming out of the cafeteria one day. So she extrapolated that to estimate that “everyone” at her school was in some way involved in sexting. Of course this is ridiculous. I haven’t seen a sexting study report prevalence rates higher than 31% for receiving a “sext” and most studies put the rate in the teens. In fact the Crimes Against Children Research Center recently reported that only 7.1% of students between the ages of 10 and 17 had received a “sext” (and this was a nationally representative survey – about as good as you can get methodologically).

So whenever I find a particular statistic cited, the first thing I do is attempt to uncover the original source and then review the methodology. What was the sample? How were participants selected to be in that sample? What specific questions were asked? Take once again the issue of sexting. How exactly is “sexting” defined? If you ask teens whether they have *ever* seen a nude or semi-nude image of another person on a cell phone, the number who say yes will likely be very high (if they are being truthful). If you ask them, on the other hand, if they had seen a nude or semi-nude image of another student from their school in the last 30 days, the number will be much lower. This is the question that we asked in our research, but even it can be misinterpreted. I mean, what exactly is “semi-nude?”

This brings me to the original point of this post. I have seen too many times to count the statistic that “over 160,000 students stay home every school day due to bullying.” Here are some representative examples:

“Bullying Statistics”

“Facts About Bullying”

“Bullied to Death in America’s Schools”

“Things You Should Know About Bullying”

I have also seen it twice in the last week in summaries for bullying prevention programs being offered by experts. I even found it in a 1993 article in the New York Times. Interestingly, I see it most commonly cited in news reports and governmental reports. Do a Google search for that statistic and you will see it thousands of times. But where did it come from? It has been attributed to many different sources (ABC News, National Education Association, and several books).  Most commonly, it is credited to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At least one CDC report cites a book written in 1998 (Real boys: Rescuing our sons form the myths of boyhood by William Pollack). That book attributes the statistic to the National Association of School Psychologists, but doesn’t provide a specific citation to a specific study or source. So where did it come from? I have put the question to some of the brightest minds in the area of bullying prevention and research and nobody knows. So if anyone out there has a specific study that includes this statistic, I would love to see it.

There is no question that too many students stay home from school every day because of fear of bullying.  The exact number is difficult to really know.  But it does this field a disservice to mis-cite or simply report statistics without being able to substantiate them.  Bullying *is* a serious problem that warrants our attention.  But the case can be made for this using reliable and valid statistics, not hyperbole.

I’ve been seeing a lot of “cyberbullying pledges” surfacing in recent months. Obviously, the intention is good – to enlist and rally the support of youth who belong to a school or another organization to end (or at least reduce) the problem of peer harassment. I think that it is important for us to think through the way that we tackle this initiative. Setting up a pledge campaign is fairly uncreative and cost-efficient, which is probably why so many adults think that it is a good idea to demonstrate that “something” is being done in the way of cyberbullying prevention. But what about its utility? We should never implement programming because it is easy to do and we want to check-off an item on our list of efforts made to combat a problem.

Research on “virginity” pledges based on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the mid-1990s and on drug/alcohol abstinence in high schools (such as in the DARE program) has shown that those who truly believe in what they are pledging for/against do definitely hold fast to that commitment as time goes on. However, it has also been shown that pledges are useful ONLY in contexts where there are some – but not too many – individuals who pledge. Pledges lose their meaning if everyone is doing it because it ceases to be non-normative. You can’t try to get everyone in a school to pledge to do something, because everyone will generally do so in name only – just to fit in.

Pledging to do something provides adherence to a group identity – and let’s face it, we all want to belong to a group in cultural or counter-cultural ways. To be sure, this notion is exponentially greater for most adolescents in the throes of identity development and exploration. It seems, then, that a teen making a meaningful choice to refrain from engaging in an attractive but wrongful behavior (such as cyberbullying) should do so outside of peer influence and group dynamics which may shape that choice.

My colleague Stan Davis (whose extensive work on bullying and bystanders I greatly respect) has a great idea which works extremely well. He believes that dialoguing about cyberbullying and its impact with students can really help them internalize the harm that is experienced and the negative outcomes that can result, and – more importantly – can help them envision and then realize their potential for the *positive* outcomes that can result. This involves reflecting on the good deeds they have done while interacting online, and the good deeds that others have done online towards them.

He also suggests that young people “write and sign a letter to themselves outlining their own plans for keeping themselves and others safe in the digital world.” The best way to go about this would be to divide it into two parts – “what I will NOT do, and why” and “what I WILL do, and why.” One of Stan’s friends also recommended that these letters should not be read by adults (and the young people should know that the letters will not be read) because “When it is known that adults will read the letters, young people are likely to write what they think adults want to hear rather than what they really plan to do.” Based on experience, this has been proven true. Stan then proposes that the sealed letters are returned to the teens in the near future to “reinforce the resolve they made.”

Let us know your thoughts about pledges and their value – and if you know of any other research on the topic. Also, let us know if you give Stan’s idea a try with the teens you supervise and care for.

So…I’m sure by now you all have heard the news story and seen the attendant video of the cheerleader in Lakeland, Florida who was lured into a “friend’s” home and then severely beaten by that friend and other cheerleaders. All of this for basically talking smack over MySpace (cyberbullying?) about those friends. So what we have is a vivid depiction of six girls who carefully coordinated (with two male lookouts and everything) a vicious attack (to where she suffered a concussion and fell unconscious) on an unsuspecting girl at a home where no parents were around…and where she was detained with no freedom to leave…and where the violence was recorded for the purposes of uploading it to YouTube and MySpace…. Then she was taken in a car, dropped off at some random location, and threatened with more beatings if she went to the authorities.
Points to consider:
1. What is the deal with these girls being so horrifically violent? Is this not out of the ordinary, but seems so because the recording has so starkly shown us the hostility and aggression of which some girls are capable? Is it possible that girls are actually *just as prone to violence* as boys (not withstanding testosterone and so forth) but have been constrained by social acceptability…but perhaps those standards are eroding or fading or being diluted as the years go by?
2. Is our culture being desensitized to female violence? For example, you turn on The Real World on MTV and we are seeing more frequently verbal violence and even physical violence among girls.
3. Were the girls playing to the camera…performing, if you will? Were they, to some degree, looking for their 15 minutes of fame by recording themselves in this video?
4. What were the girls thinking, in terms of escaping identification, apprehension, and punishment, with the recording of the criminal assault?
5. Are the parents at fault?
6. Has anyone seen the MySpace postings, as I’d like to consider their contents?
7. Has anyone figured out how to download flash video, because I’d like to archive those videos linked from that site to show others?

Article and unedited video here.