in the cloud

New Study Reports One in Six Students Victim of Cyberbullying

One in six U.S. high school students reported being electronically bullied within the past 12 months, according to a new study.

The study also found that almost one-third of high school students spend three or more hours each day playing video games or using a computer.

“Electronic bullying of high school students threatens the self-esteem, emotional well-being and social standing of youth at a very vulnerable stage of their development,” said Andrew Adesman, M.D., F.A.A.P., of Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York and lead author of the study.

How to Stop the Bullies

He explained, in his appealingly blunt way, “What we have over you is that your Facebook profile is of value to you. It’s a hostage situation.” This didn’t surprise me. In the course of my reporting, I’d been asking middle-school and high-school students whether they’d rather be suspended from school or from Facebook, and most of them picked school.

photo via flickr:CC | Ken Whytock

Bullied Children Can Suffer Lasting Psychological Harm as Adults

Bullied children grow into adults who are at increased risk of developing anxiety disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts, according to a study led by researchers at Duke Medicine.

The findings, based on more than 20 years of data from a large group of participants initially enrolled as adolescents, are the most definitive to date in establishing the long-term psychological effects of bullying.

“We were surprised at how profoundly bullying affects a person’s long-term functioning,” said William E. Copeland, PhD, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University and lead author of the study. “This psychological damage doesn’t just go away because a person grew up and is no longer bullied. This is something that stays with them. If we can address this now, we can prevent a whole host of problems down the road.”

To This Day

The memories of bullying during childhood can haunt you forever — which is why spoken word poet Shane Koyczan is creating a message through a poem and animated video that will stick with you from this day onward.

How are you standing up to bullying?

UW-Madison culling tweets about bullying

Posts from the social media service Twitter are providing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a new way to study bullying among kids.

UW-Madison researchers Amy Bellmore and Jerry Zhu, along with graduate students Junming Sui and Kwang-Sung Jun, have been able to teach a computer to identify tweets about bullying among Twitter’s 250 million daily posts.

The researchers said the computer was able to quickly learn to identify more than 15,000 bullying-related tweets per day.

One goal of the researchers’ work is to assist traditional bullying research. Typically, this research relies on surveys in which victims and bullies report their experiences. This means researchers get a one-time glance at what is happening within a small population.

photo via flickr:CC | Western MAJ

Should bullies be treated as criminals?

Do Students Have the Right to Post Negative Comments Online?

Civil rights groups recently intervened in a free-speech controversy at the San Francisco Unified School District after a school suspended three high school seniors and banned them from graduation and prom over comments they made online.

In Bullying Programs, A Call For Bystanders To Act

Many schools started by cracking down on bullies, then later focused on propping up victims, with the hope of helping to make them “bully-proof.” Now, they have shifted their efforts to people who witness bullying.

When school fights land on YouTube

Two boys are fighting in a Calvert County middle school. A crowd of students laugh and jeer until a teacher arrives to break it up. Later discipline is meted out.

But the fight is not nearly over.

A video goes up on YouTube — 32 seconds of personal humiliation for the boy who is taking most of the punches. He has often been bullied in middle school, according to his family, and now is shown being hit in the head and side and placed in a headlock.

Crime at US public schools on the decline

Violent crime at the nation’s schools is declining, and students and schools are reporting less bullying and gang activity. But new government data reports an increase in cyber bullying and youth suicides.

State report points to bullying, self-harm among high schoolers

Wisconsin’s high school students are using seatbelts more and smoking less than in previous years, but trends in bullying and and self-harm raise questions about the emotional state of teens in the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

The survey, released Thursday, shows that 24% of high schoolers reported being bullied on school property in the last 12 months, up slightly from 23% of high schoolers who reported being bullied recently on school property in the 2009 behavior survey.

The 2011 survey asked about cyberbullying for the first time, and 17% of respondents said they had been bullied electronically.

The behavior survey was administered to more than 3,000 students in 58 public schools. The survey is conducted as part of a national effort by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Advocates, experts call for more attention to bullying of special needs-students

Special-education advocates are calling for the state to do more to address the bullying of disabled students, saying that a recent lawsuit against the city school system highlights the long-lasting harm that harassment can do to such children.

Fighting cyber-bullying in the classroom

Talking to your students about cyber-bullying can be a little intimidating—technology is one of those areas where we keenly feel our “uncoolness.” Do we know all the latest terms? Are we going to do more harm than good? This article will educate you about cyber-bullying and discuss some classroom strategies to help your students overcome the urge to bully as well as the urge to cover up bullying.

Four Difficult Questions Regarding Bullying and Youth Suicide

Over the last couple of years, I’ve laid awake at night asking myself uncomfortable questions about bullying and teen suicide. I don’t have answers to most of the questions that I have, but I’m choosing to voice my questions, fears, and doubts because I’m not confident that our war on bullying is taking us down the right path. I’m worried about the unintended consequences of our public discourse and I’m worried about the implications that our decisions have on youth, particularly in this high-stakes arena. So I’m asking these four tough questions in the hopes that we can collectively step back and think critically about how we’re addressing bullying as a public issue.

1. What if the stranger danger / sexual predator moral panic increased LGBT suicide?
2. What if “It Gets Better” increases emotional devastation for some LGBT youth?
3. What if the media spotlight around bullying causes harm to youth?
4. What if us adults are part of the problem?

Please read.

Rough Drafts: Nit-twits?

roughdrafts1 talks about students at school:

Something of concern is definitely happening at our high school. This something is more commonly known as Twitter. Last year, a few kids had caught on to Twitter, but this year there are exponentially more students using Twitter instead of texts to communicate with their friends. It didn’t really…

Unfortunately this is a similar story for many schools. Does your school have policies in place (bullying, etc) dealing specifically with off-campus off-schoolday-time cyberbullying that you could share with us?