A study conducted by the University of New Hampshire in 2000 found 6% of teens who engaged in online activities were victims of cyber-bullying. Five years later, a survey by the National Children’s Home revealed an increase, with 20% of teens reporting to have been bullied by electronic means. And today, PEW Internet & American Life Project’s latest survey reveals one in three teens have experienced online harassment, a substantial growth and likely to be the highest numbers reported.

But don’t call Guinness just yet; PEW defines cyber-bullying (in this report) as an ‘annoying and potentially menacing online activity,’ – and the word spam comes to mind; in which case, we’ve all been the victim of online harassment.

However, a few interesting things came from PEW’s report; the most common form of cyber-bullying originates in someone making your private information public such as forwarding instant messages and e-mails to other people without consent, spreading rumors online, and having risque or embarrassing images uploaded to online galleries.

Among those who are the most likely to be targets of harassment are teens who share their identities and thoughts online through social networking sites and personal blogs.

Of the 935 teenagers surveyed, the majority told PEW that they’ve had a private e-mail or IM forwarded or publicly posted without permission, something which I wouldn’t consider harassment, but was used to determine PEW’s “one in three” result.

One anonymous, sixteen-year-old girl, in PEW’s survey, described a more legitimate form of cyber-bullying:

“There’s one Myspace [profile] from my school this year. There’s this boy in my anatomy class who everybody hates. He’s, like, the smart kid in the 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.”

67% of teens say that bullying and harassment happens more offline than online, proving that this form of aggression has been been plaguing teens long before the Internet existed; it’s just manifesting itself in a different form for a digital age.

The survey failed to ask the teens whether they would prefer bullying in school or on the Internet; you can’t get a wedgie, melvin, swirlie, wet-willie, beat up, or tea-bagged online.

Whether it be the schoolyard bully or the e-bully, the only thing that has changed in recent years is the hype around bullying on the Internet. Perhaps the only problem with cyber bullying is those who care about it in the first place.

Given that, we’ll take the ‘glass is half full’ approach and say that 2 out of 3 teens have not been bullied online.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 7:34 pm under Opinion.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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