p2pnet - rss feed: US teens say Net bullying is rife
p2pnet.net news:- About one third (32%) of American youngsters say they’ve been targets of online bullying, with girls as the most likely victims.
What kind of bad behaviour? Like receiving threatening messages, having their private emails or text messages forwarded without their permission, having an embarrassing picture posted, or having rumours about them spread.
And teenagers signed up to sites such as MySpace and Facebook and who use the Net daily are also more likely to say they’ve been cyberbullied, continues a Pew Internet & American Life Project report.
One 16-year-old girl, “casually described how she and her classmates bullied a fellow student, it says, quoting her as stating:
There’s one MySpace from my school this year. There’s this boy in my anatomy class who everybody hates. He’s like the smart kid in class. Everybody’s jealous. They all want to be smart. He always wants to work in our group and I hate it. And we started this thing, some girl in my class started this I Hate [Name] MySpace thing. So everybody in school goes on it to comment bad things about this boy.
But asked where they thought bullying happened most often to teens their age, 67% it was more likely happen offline than on.
“Fewer than one in three teens (29%) said that they thought that bullying was more likely to happen online, and 3% said they thought it happened both online and offline equally,” says the study.
Not surprisingly, teenagers who share their identities and thoughts online are more likely to be targeted than are those, “who lead less active online lives”.
“Of all the online harassment asked about, the greatest number of teens told us that they had had a private communication forwarded or publicly posted without their permission,” says Pew.
“One-in-six teens (15%) said that someone had forwarded or posted communication they assumed was private. About 13% of teens said that someone had spread a rumor about them online, and another 13% said that someone had sent them a threatening or aggressive email, IM or text message. Some 6% of online teens told us that someone had posted an embarrassing picture of them without their permission.”
Girls are more likely than boys to say that they’ve experienced cyberbullying, says Pew, Thirty-eight percent said they’d been bullied, compared with 26% of online boys.
“Older girls in particular are more likely to report being bullied than any other age and gender group, with 41% of online girls ages 15 to 17 reporting these experiences,” the report observes.
Nearly four in 10 (39%) of social network users say they’ve been cyberbullied in someway, compared with 22% of online teens who don’t use the likes of MySpace or Facebook.
Also See:
Pew - Cyberbullying and Online Teens, June 27, 2007
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