by Diana Graber
According to the #StatusOfMind survey, published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for Public Health, “Seeing friends constantly on holiday or enjoying nights out can make young people feel like they are missing out while others enjoy life. These feelings can promote a ‘compare and despair’ attitude in young people. Individuals may view heavily photoshopped, edited, or staged photographs and videos and compare them to their seemingly mundane lives.”46
But researchers found some benefits from social media use, too. All five networks surveyed—Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook—received positive scores for self-identity, self-expression, community building, and emotional support. YouTube got high marks for providing access to trustworthy information, while Facebook was lauded for providing “groups” or “pages” where youth could surround themselves with like-minded friends. This was especially beneficial to the well-being of LGBTQ+ youth and those who belong to ethnic minorities, two populations that find it challenging to find like-minded peers in their offline communities.
ONCE AGAIN, AGE MATTERS
How children use and respond to social media is highly dependent upon their ages. While younger children use media in “playful, creative ways— often to play games”—this lighthearted attitude changes abruptly by middle school. As exposure to peers via social media ramps up, their well-being reaches a “cliff edge,” according to a Children’s Commission for England report. That’s when kids need “lessons around digital literacy and online resilience,” because “lessons around online safety learned at younger ages are insufficient.”47
Amen to that! I heartily agree that kids at this stage need help with the difficult task of managing their online social lives. Talking with middle schoolers about their online lives gives them a chance to notice the ridiculousness of counting likes or posting at the right hour of the night. Often, they independently conclude, “Gosh, maybe it’s really not worth all the trouble.” Whether this revelation lasts more than a week or two is hard to say. But I do know this: It’s unlikely kids are going to step back and even consider the possibility, unless adults provide the time and opportunity for them to do so.
My friend Liz Repking, founder and CEO of Cyber Safety Consulting, regularly visits schools to talk to kids about their digital lives, and she has three children of her own. “What really gets me is how deeply kids are craving help, and knowledge, and direction when it comes to all this stuff,” says Repking. “They are craving it so, so deeply. We have to give these kids the help they need.”48
Repking is right. Kids do need our help, especially to learn how to avoid the big risks that come with making and maintaining relationships online. So let’s look at the big two they need our help with: sexting and cyberbullying.
SEXTING
Before Peter Kelley began helping me with Cyber Civics, he was an English teacher at a large public high school in Southern California. When we started working together in 2016, he told me a story that still haunts me.
At Kelly’s school there was a popular, outgoing cheerleader named Carrie, who was a junior at the time of this story. Carrie appeared to have everything going for her. That is, until she made one terrible mistake. While in a committed relationship with a boy from the same school, she and the boy shot a sex video of themselves. Shortly after doing so, they broke up. Then, for whatever reason, or for no reason at all, the boy shared the video online with some friends, who shared it with their friends, and so on. Kelley told me that, before long, “There was not a single person at the school who had not seen or at least knew about that sex video.”49
Because of her mistake, Carrie was kicked off the cheerleading squad. Her cheerleading friends stopped hanging out with her, and soon other students began pointing or laughing at her when she passed by. According to Kelley, who was also the school’s tennis coach, “She tried everything to make new friends and get back into school life, even trying out for the tennis team without any prior experience. Of course, in high school it’s hard to earn a position in a sport you’ve never played before, so she didn’t make the team. She had a hard time finding any place to fit in.”
“I watched this super-outgoing, confident girl turn into a sad, fearful one,” Kelley told me. “It was heartbreaking to watch. It seemed like a high price to pay for one mistake.”
That incident helped Kelley decide to quit his teaching job, and start working with me, though he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t stick around long enough to see what ultimately happened with this girl.” But before he quit, he asked the students in one of his English classes to raise their hands if they thought they would have benefited from lessons in digital literacy during middle school.
“Every hand went up,” he said.50
WHAT EXACTLY IS SEXTING?
Sexting is the sending, receiving, or forwarding of any sexually explicit message, photograph, or image between digital devices (most commonly cell phones). Sending “sexts” of people under the age of eighteen, even between two teenagers in a relationship, is illegal in most states.
Teens are seldom aware of sexting’s full definition and, more concerningly, its consequences. Every year when I deliver lessons on sexting to eighth-grade students and explain that if they create and share sexually explicit images of themselves, they are technically producing, distributing, or possessing child pornography, they are surprised, shocked even. I tell them they could get into as much trouble for receiving an unsolicited sext as for sending one. You should see their faces as they mentally calculate who, among their hundreds, sometimes thousands, of online “friends” might send them such a thing.
Most schools today don’t give their students the courtesy of such lessons, even though the consequences for getting caught sexting are severe. In California, where I live, “individuals who distribute, possess, or produce a sexually explicit image of a minor could be charged under the State’s child pornography statutes. If the individual is tried as an adult and is convicted, they could receive up to six years in jail and will generally be required to register as a sex offender.”51
In states that have not enacted specific laws that address sexting by minors (which is most states), the possession of sexually explicit material portraying minors falls under their existing child pornography laws.
I hope that seems as unfair to you as it does to me.
My assistant, Anna, is a bright college student who helped me while I was writing this book. One day I asked her if she had ever been taught anything about sexting when she was in middle or high school. “No, never,” she told me. “I had no idea you could get into as much trouble for receiving a sext as sending one. I learned about that from Piper, and it was really a surprise!” Piper is my daughter. She was a student in the first series of Cyber Civics classes I taught and thus had to suffer the embarrassment of her mother explaining sexting to her and her classmates when she was in eighth grade. Her discomfort aside, I was happy to hear that this lesson had spread beyond the walls of our small classroom.
WHO’S SEXTING?
In early 2018, a comprehensive study on teen sexting published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed that one in four teenagers reports having received a sext and one in seven reports having sent one. Considering the severity of getting caught for such an offense, these findings are startling.
The researchers who conducted this study analyzed a significant amount of data—thirty-nine previous studies with 110,000 participants, split evenly between girls and boys between the ages of eleven and eighteen. They discovered that the number of kids involved in sexting has risen significantly in recent years, due to the number of kids who have their own phones today. It’s not just boys asking girls for “nudes” either. Researchers found no significant difference between the sexes pertaining to either sending or receiving sexting messages. The data also revealed that teens are more likely to send and receive sexts with each year of increasing age, a conclusion that “lends credence to the notion that yout
h sexting may be an emerging, and potentially normal, component of sexual behavior and development.”52
This data does not surprise Dr. Michelle Drouin. “I would say sexting is a part of the normative teenage, early adulthood experience now,” she told me. “So it is very, very common to send some type of sexually explicit message. That could be a text-only message. It could be a photo or video message. More than half of my young adult students have sent this type of message. And by the time they hit young adulthood, more than half have sent sexually explicit pictures.”53
Dr. Drouin, a developmental psychologist, is a professor of psychology at Purdue University Fort Wayne. She is also an internationally recognized speaker who travels extensively to deliver talks on technology and relationships, including social media and sexting. There is comfort in talking with Drouin about sexting because she views it matter-of-factly and in the context of normal teenage behavior, and I think that’s important. While the media and the laws that currently cover sexting (child pornography laws) sometimes paint it as a dangerous and illegal act, if you strip away the hysteria and look at it from a developmental viewpoint, it becomes something entirely different.
“It’s not a bad kid thing,” explains Drouin. “Rather, what you have is a perfect storm of budding sexuality combined with a child’s first freedom on their own technological device. On top of all that, this budding sexuality happens well before the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for impulse control—is fully developed. Young teens still have quite a bit of brain development to go in terms of the ability to think about consequences. So kids often send sext messages without thinking.”54
They also don’t think they’ll get caught. But for those few unlucky ones who do, the consequences can be devastating, as in these cases:
•Seven students in Iowa’s Storm Lake School District, ranging from fifteen to seventeen years old, faced criminal charges for sharing phone text messages that contained nude photos. Three faced felony charges, while another four faced serious misdemeanor charges.55
•A seventeen-year-old star football player in Michigan who exchanged nude photos with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend was charged with two counts of second-degree sexual exploitation and three counts of third-degree exploitation. If convicted, he could spend ten years behind bars and be forced to register as a sex offender. As he awaited trial, he was dropped from his high school football team. His girlfriend opted for a plea deal and was sentenced to one year of probation without access to a cell phone, had to enroll in a class on making smarter life decisions, and had to pay a $200 fine.56
•Twenty high-school students in Long Island, New York, were suspended for up to five days for simply receiving or forwarding a sex video that was sent to them via a group text. Suspended students included those who received the video and didn’t even know what it was.57
Several of the experts I spoke to while writing this book told me sexting has become one of the most serious problems at the schools they work with. Even teens who have not engaged in sexting themselves either know or have heard of a friend who’s sent, been asked for, or has received a sexually explicit message via electronic device. That’s what I hear, too. In the words of one of my students, “In high school, everyone does it.” Or at least that’s what everyone thinks.
It doesn’t appear that the number of kids who engage in sexting is likely to decrease, especially without education as to its possible consequences. As Jeff Temple, one of the researchers of the JAMA study, told the Washington Post, “As tweens and kid smartphone ownership gets younger and younger, we are going to see an increase in the number of teens who are sexting.”58
WHAT TO TELL KIDS ABOUT SEXTING
When I first started teaching Cyber Civics, I struggled to find the right advice to give students about sexting. After all, it would have to be the exact opposite of what I’d told them about nearly every other online danger: “Take a screenshot of the evidence.” Obviously, encouraging students to keep child pornography on their phones was not the best guidance. Fortunately, I found the advice I’d been searching for, in language students would understand, in a blog post written by Dr. Justin Patchin of the Cyberbullying Research Center (more about this organization in a moment). I share this excerpt with students and teachers today:
If you do receive [a sext] image, odds are that it was sent by a good friend (or a boyfriend or girlfriend). As a result, you probably don’t want to get this person into too much trouble, but you also know that peddling in these kinds of pictures is probably not going to lead to great things in life. If you think about it, it is highly inappropriate, morally wrong, and potentially illegal. So what do you do? Most adults might advise you to “tell an adult you trust.” This is generally good advice for a lot of problems you run into. However, in the case of a naked photo of an underaged youth, this can be devastating for all involved. If you show the image to a teacher, he or she is likely required by law to report it to the police. Teachers who don’t can lose their teaching license and/or be fired. If they don’t know what to do and seek guidance from a fellow teacher, they could get into even more trouble. If you give the teacher your cell phone with the nude image, and he or she shows another teacher, both teachers (and you) could be charged with “possession” of child pornography, since they had possession of your phone. That’s because the police often treat these images as child pornography—irrespective of the sender’s intent or the relationship of those involved. This means that if you took the picture, you can be charged with the “creation of child pornography.” If you send or forward the pic, you can be charged with “distribution of child pornography.” If you keep it on your phone, you can be charged with “possession of child pornography.” In some cases, you could even end up on state sex offender registries.
My advice to teens who receive a nude or seminude image of a classmate is simple: Immediately delete it. Don’t tell anyone about it. If there is an investigation, and someone asks if you received the image, you should tell them yes, but that you immediately deleted it. If necessary, they can get your cell phone records from your service provider and search your phone’s contents, which will show that you deleted it within seconds of receiving it. This is the best situation for you. Some adults aren’t going to like this advice because they want to be “in the know” to attempt to deal with the problem, but I think this is the only safe advice I can offer youth at this point.59
CYBERBULLYING
Although this chapter begins with a lighthearted anecdote about a situation mischaracterized as “cyberbullying,” it’s important to acknowledge that actual cyberbullying is a serious, unsolved, digital-age problem. If you want a comprehensive education on cyberbullying—a wise expenditure of time for any parent with a connected kid—I strongly urge you to visit the Cyberbullying Research Center (https://cyberbullying.org), founded by Dr. Sameer Hinduja and Dr. Justin Patchin. The site, launched while the pair was studying cyberbullying in graduate school at Michigan State, provides a wealth of reliable research and other resources about cyberbullying prevention and response.
Hinduja defines cyberbullying as “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices,” which aligns with the four indicators I give students: It’s online, intentional, repeated, and harmful.60 In terms of prevalence, he says that based on their nationally representative data of U.S. youth between the ages of twelve and seventeen:
•Seventy-three percent of students reported that they had been bullied at school at some point in their lifetime (44 percent said it happened in the last thirty days).
•Thirty-four percent of students had experienced cyberbullying in their lifetime (17 percent within the last thirty days).
Each year, I ask students to raise their hands if they have ever been bullied. About half raise their hands. Then I ask if they know anyone who has ever been bullied. Every kid raises a hand at this question. Every kid.
By any accoun
t, the number of kids who have experienced or witnessed bullying is alarming. The fact that, according to Hinduja’s research, nearly three out of four kids are being bullied in person at school—a problem that has existed since there was school—is bad enough. But when you realize that new technologies enable a whole new type of cruelty, cyberbullying, and that one out of three kids has experienced it, that should be a wake-up call for all of us. It’s often the same kids who endure both types of bullying. A Cyberbullying Research Center project discovered that 42.4 percent of cyberbullying victims were also victims of offline bullying.
It is important to note that while lots of kids have experienced or witnessed cruelty online, lots of kids have experienced or witnessed kindness, too. A report from the Pew Research Center finds that “69 percent of social media-using teens think that peers are mostly kind to each other on social network sites.”61 Proving, yet again, that kids’ digital lives are confusing and complicated.
This positive data should not let us off the hook. No words can express the anguish in the eyes of a bullied child. We must solve this problem.
UNDERSTANDING CYBERBULLYING
While in-person bullying remains more prevalent than cyberbullying, some characteristics of cyberbullying make it particularly intense:
1.There is no delete button online. Targets often live with the constant reminder of cruelty when it’s online. Even if they block the sender or delete the evidence from their own devices, other kids may see, save, or share it.
2.It’s constant. While kids can walk away from physical bullying, there is no hiding from cyberbullying when they go home. Most kids carry their devices around 24/7.
