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Dr. Justin Patchin/UW-Eau Claire Professor of Criminal Justice: Our sort of goal in the Cyberbullying Research Center is
to provide empirical data to the cyber bullying problem.
To identify the causes and the consequences of cyber bullying.
To better understand how teens are using and misusing technology.
There are a lot of reasons why cyber-bullying is, potentially,
a lot worse for some kids that traditional bullying.
Cyber-bulling is different from traditional bullying in a number of ways.
First, the fact that the cyber bully can at least attempt to be anonymous,
by setting up a fake e-mail address, or a fake Facebook page,
I was talking to this 17 year old girl from Ohio about her experience with cyberbullying,
and she was telling me how helpless she felt, because she didn't know
who it was who was cyber bullying her, she didn't know why they were doing it,
she didn't know who she could tell, how she could get it to stop.
When we talk to the teens who admit to us that they've cyber-bullied others a lot
of times they don't see the harm in their behaviors.
They think they're just joking around, they're just having fun,
they don't really see the harm that they're causing
The limitless vulnerability, the fact that, you know, when we were bullied,
growing up, we could go home and we were protected.
The bully couldn't reach us in our homes.
But now, the cyber-bully can.
One of the victims described it as being tethered to their tormentor,
you can't escape, Once something is put online, you literally
cannot remove it, especially not easily, so the victimization can continue just over and over and over again.
whereas if this were a face-to-face situation, maybe it would die down after a couple of weeks,
and people would forget about it, but being as there is that
constant reminder with the technological evidence right there it's hard to forget.
Social media is definitely a conduit through
which a lot of cyber-bullying occurs, primarily because that's where teens are hanging out.
We just wrap our brains around My Space, an no one wants anything to do with My Space, right.
Now it's Facebook. What's it going to be five or ten years down the road?
so we find in our research that about 20 percent,
maybe a little less of teens have cyber bullied others at some point in their lifetime,
that's a pretty consistent finding. What we can also say is
that 80 percent of teens are not doing it.
that 80 percent of teens are not doing it.
We've also found, that over time, their behavior online is improving;
the first study we did on My Space in 2006 found that 39 percent of students had their profiles set to private,
the last one we did in 2009 was 85 percent, had their profiles private.
They're learning, and their behaviors are improving.