Cyber Risk of Children and Youth

Cyber Risk of Children and Youth in a Cyber World

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ecognition of the pervasiveness and gravity of bullying has led to the accumulation of a large body of research (Olweus, 1994; Williams & Guerra, 2007).  The harmful effects of bullying have been documented across multiple areas of children’s and adolescents’ lives including academic, social, emotional, and physical health (Nansel, Overpeck, Pilla, Ruan, Simons-Morton, & Scheidt, 2001; O’Connell, Pepler, & Craig, 1999).

The exponential growth of electronic and computer based communication and information sharing during the last decade has radically changed individuals’ social interactions, learning strategies and choice of entertainment.  More particularly, the Internet has created a whole new world of social communications for young people whose use of e-mail, websites, instant messaging, social networking sites, web cams, and text messaging is exploding worldwide (Blais, Craig, Pepler, & Connolly, 2007; David-Ferdon & Hertz, 2007; Media Awareness Network, 2005; Ybarra & Mitchell, 2004).  Approximately 95% of Canadian youth access the Internet from their homes and spend an average of 2-4 hours online each day (Media Awareness Network, 2005).  Indeed, children and youth use technology such as the Internet more than any other medium with which to communicate (Kaynay & Yelsma, 2000; Nie & Hillygus, 2002), and the rapid increase of Internet use and other forms of technology enables children and youth to engage in a vast array of experiences beyond the confines of their homes, schools and local communities.

The Internet provides innumerable possibilities for growth among children and youth, including psychosocial benefits such as identity exploration and social support, as well as educational benefits generated from expansive access to knowledge, academic support and worldwide cross-cultural interactions (Raskind, Margalit & Higgins, 2006; Tynes, 2007; Valkenburg & Peter, 2007).  Although the Internet provides many benefits for children and youth and although most online interactions are either neutral or positive, the Internet is concurrently a potential site for abuse of children and adolescents—bullying, stalking, solicitation and pornography.  Indeed, cyber abuse of children and youth is a growing problem. Cyber abuse is an umbrella term that encompasses online abusive interpersonal behaviors including online bullying, stalking, sexual solicitation, and exposure to pornography. Cyber bullying comprises “the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others” (Belsey, 2008). Cyber stalking is the use of electronic mediums to harass, menace, or contact another in an unsolicited fashion (Basu & Jones, 2007).  Cyber sexual solicitation involves the use of electronic mediums to identify, “groom” and entice children and youth to perform sexual acts on or offline (Finkelhor, Mitchell & Wolak, 2000).  Online pornography includes the production and dissemination of graphic sexual content through technology (Wolak, Mitchell & Finkelhor, 2007).

Cyber abuse of children and youth is a growing problem (Berson, Berson, & Ferron, 2002; Mitchell, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2001, 2003).  Evidence suggests that experiences of cyber stalking and exposure to unwanted sexual content have increased among youth, to 34% and 9% respectively (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2006).  Youth are sexually solicited by strangers and, commonly, by family members or acquaintances, who use the Internet to further their offline intentions (Mishna, McLuckie, & Saini, revised and resubmitted; Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell & Ybarra, 2008).  Disturbingly, the already low rate at which authorities were informed about online sexual solicitation decreased from 2000 to 2005, with  9% of incidents of solicitation reported in 2000, compared to only 5% in 2005 (Wolak et al., 2006).

We conducted a study to examine the frequency, impact, and differential experience of cyber bullying among middle and high school students.  Once ethics approval was granted by the University of Toronto and school board Research Ethics Boards, a survey was administered to 2186 middle and high-school students in two school boards in the Greater Toronto Area.  The survey examined technology use, cyber bullying behaviours, and the psychosocial impact of bullying and being bullied.  Descriptive statistics and chi-square were conducted to assess the prevalence of cyber bullying behaviours and the differential experience of cyber bullying by gender and age.  The questionnaires included general questions about the students’ socio-demographic characteristics, electronic technology use, and the experience and impact of cyber bullying.  Rather than ask a broad question about the participation in cyber bullying/being bullied, the questionnaire asked a series of questions about perpetrating or being the victim of a variety of online behaviours without explicitly defining the behaviours as bullying.  These included calling someone names, threatening, spreading rumours, sending a private picture without consent, pretending to be someone else, receiving or sending unwanted sexual text or photos, or being asked to do something sexual.  According to our findings 21% of students reported being bullied online and 35% reported bullying others (Mishna, Cook, Gadalla, Daciuk, Solomon, & MacFadden, under review), making cyber bullying a significant public health concern (David-Ferdon & Hertz, 2007; Ybarra & Mitchell, 2004).

While the negative effects of some forms of cyber abuse such as stalking, sexual solicitation, and exposure to pornography may seem self-evident, compelling evidence suggests that cyber bullying also causes significant harm.  Canadian students who were cyber bullied reported feeling sad, anxious, afraid and unable to concentrate at school (Beran & Li, 2005). Depression, substance use and delinquency are significantly higher among youth who report being bullied or sexually solicited online (Mitchell, Ybarra & Finklehor, 2007).  Furthermore, involvement in cyber bullying either as perpetrator or as victim, has negative effects on youth’s mental health over and above those experienced due to “real world” bullying (Blais, Craig, Pepler, & Connolly, 2008).  Youth who perpetrate cyber abuse are more likely to engage in rule-breaking and to have problems with aggression (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2007), school and substance use, and to be both the target and perpetrator of offline bullying (Hinduja & Patchin, 2007).

Given the belief that protection from abuse is a fundamental human right, others are obliged to intervene (Atlas & Pepler, 1998; Olweus, 1991, 1997). The growing incidence of cyber abuse in young people’s lives has been met with increasing concern among parents and professionals faced with ensuring the wellbeing of youth. There is an associated growing drive towards developing prevention and intervention strategies to protect children and youth online, which encompass education for children and parents about Internet risks, software which filters or blocks offensive material, and methods to prevent potential offenders from carrying out cyber abuse. Youth who receive education on Internet safety exhibit more knowledge of Internet safety strategies (Chibnall, Wallace, Leicht, & Lunghofer, 2006), and of associated dangers (Davidson & Martellozzo, 2005), yet there is little no change in risky online behaviour (Chibnall et al., 2006; Crombie & Trinneer, 2003).  Internet filtering and site blocking are reasonably effective in reducing, but not eliminating, online sexual content to which children are exposed (Schneider, 1997) and software improperly blocks benign content (Hunter, 2000; Schneider, 1997).  While filtering software is associated with less exposure to sexual content, it is not linked to decreased online harassment (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2004).

Prevention and education efforts do not address the various risk factors that make some youth more vulnerable to particular types of online abuse as either perpetrator or victim.  The context, nature and effects of cyber abuse demand that approaches to understanding and addressing cyber safety and risk:

1. cut across a child’s entire social world;
2. are developmentally appropriate;
3. identify and target the range of risk levels among children and youth;
4. integrate community and interdisciplinary collaboration; and
5. are empirically validated.

An ecological systems framework is essential to understanding and addressing the various forms and degrees of cyber abuse (Germain & Bloom, 1999).  Based on the assumption that cyber abuse does not reside solely with a child or youth who is the perpetrator or victim this conceptual framework encompasses the child or youth’s entire social context, including peers, school, family and the larger community and society as a whole.

Since 2006, a group of 17 well established community organizations across multiple sectors, called the Canadian Coalition for CyberRisk Reduction (c3R), has come together to comprehensively address cyber abuse.  This group represents the multiple domains committed to ensuring the health and mental health of children and youth, and includes university researchers in social work, psychology and law and community partners representing education, police, children’s mental health, health promotion, and provincial and national organizations devoted to the wellbeing of children and youth.  The aims of this partnership are to: 1) examine and determine the developmental processes and mechanisms linked with cyber risk and the individual and environmental/contextual risk factors that are associated with cyber abuse; 2) document and evaluate existing prevention and intervention materials, strategies and programs on cyber risk and determine whether programs are effective and sustainable, and whether they meet the needs of students, parents and educators; and 3) develop and evaluate a new generation of prevention and intervention programs to address cyber abuse.

references

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