Teens find Web makes bullying a lot easier

The Baltimore Sun

Teenage bullying has entered the digital age. The impulses behind it are the same, but the effect is magnified. In the past, the materials of bullying would have been whispered, shouted or passed around. Now, with a few clicks, a photo, video or a conversation can be shared with hundreds via e-mail or millions through a Web site, online profile or blog posting.

About one-third of all teenagers who use the Internet say they have been targets of a range of annoying and potentially menacing online activities -- such as receiving threatening messages; having their private e-mails or text messages forwarded without consent; having an embarrassing picture posted without permission; or having rumors about them spread online.

These results come from a nationally representative phone survey of 935 teenagers by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Depending on the circumstances, these harassing or "cyber-bullying" behaviors may be truly threatening, merely annoying or relatively benign. But several patterns are clear: Girls are more likely than boys to be targets; and teens who share their identities and thoughts online are more likely to be targets than are those who lead less active online lives.

Of all the online harassment asked about, the greatest number of teens said that they had had a private communication forwarded or publicly posted without their permission. One teen in six said that someone had forwarded or posted communication they assumed was private. About 13 percent of teens said that someone had spread a rumor about them online, and another 13 percent said that someone had sent them a threatening or aggressive email, IM or text message. Some 6 percent of online teens told us that someone had posted an embarrassing picture of them without their permission.

In focus groups conducted by the Project about the issue, one 16-year-old girl casually described how she and her classmates bullied a fellow student: "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."

Girls are more likely than boys to say that they have experienced cyber-bullying -- 38 percent of online girls report being bullied, compared with 26 percent of online boys. Older girls in particular are more likely to report being bullied than any other age and gender group, with 41 percent of online girls ages 15 to 17 reporting these experiences. Teens who use social network sites like MySpace and Facebook and teens who use the Internet daily are also more likely to say that they have been cyber-bullied..

In Pew focus groups, teens were asked about online experiences they had had with bullying. In some cases, it appeared that adolescent cruelty had simply moved from the school yard, the locker room, the bathroom wall and the phone onto the Internet. The simplicity of being able to replicate and quickly transmit digital content makes bullying quite easy. "Just copy and paste whatever somebody says," a middle school girl explains as she describes online bullying tactics.

Amanda Lenhart is senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

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