Just a quick cross-cultural thought – this article discusses how approximately 10% of 9th and 10th graders in Australia have been cyberbullied…and the article compares that figure to the 50% or so (????) of American students who have been cyberbullied.  The lead researcher and professor stated that their country is about five or so years behind on issues like this…and that this problem will grow in Australia with the increased adoption of high-speed Internet connections in homes.

I personally am not sure that higher broadband speeds available at home are going to markedly enhance the rate of online victimization.  I’ve researched intellectual property theft and found a strong correlation of piracy with faster lines allowing higher throughput, but I feel that there are fundamental behavioral, cultural, and societal issues that facilitate higher rates of cyberbullying in certain countries.  For example, certain countries in the Far East (e.g., Japan, South Korea) have ridiculously fast broadband (40mbps+) to the home, but cyberbullying is not a severe problem at all because demonstrations of interpersonal aggression and violence online are shunned, shameful, and disdained.  Justin and I plan to conduct comparative cross-cultural research on cyberbullying in the near future to further flesh out the relevant issues.  For now, I’d be really interested to hear the insight of others on this matter.

As my eyes tend to be super sensitive to statistics and data related to cyberbullying, I was taken aback by the findings from a study mentioned in this recent FoxNews article. It states:

According to Parry Aftab, an Internet security and privacy lawyer and founder of WiredSafety.org, 85 percent of 5,000 middle-school students surveyed said they had been cyberbullied. Only 5 percent of them said they’d tell someone about it.

Parry does good work, and she may be citing someone else’s project, and the writer of the article may be misinterpreting or misquoting someone, but 85% is ridiculously high. In addition, 5% is incredibly low – we consistently find that youth are willing to tell a friend…and a growing number are definitely turning to adults for help.

Finally, the article states that cyberbullying peaks in 4th and 7th grade. I agree that the phenomenon is extremely prevalent among middle schoolers, but I’ve talked to a number of 4th graders across the country and while some kids have experienced very mild forms of it (at that age), it definitely doesn’t peak at 4th grade. What does that even mean, and how does that even make sense?

Anyway, wild outliers tend to color our perceptions of any phenomenon. Statistics like these are only going to lead to knee-jerk reactive responses and moral panic. I don’t think we (or the media) need to convince society of the reality of cyberbullying. As Justin pointed out previously, it is extremely important to understand exactly how cyberbullying is specifically defined, and how data are collected. Otherwise, we will continually have wide variation in stated frequencies of cyberbullying, which will only confuse everyone as to the actual extent and scope of the problem.  We know what it is, and we know (generally) how often it occurs among youth.  We now need to zero in on exactly what can be done about it.