UPDATED for 2021! This detailed guide is a nine-page summary – filled with as much useful information as possible – to equip educators, parents, and other youth-serving adults to spot cyberbullying, respond to it appropriately and meaningfully, and to prevent its future occurrence among those they care for. If you only have time to read one fact sheet from the Cyberbullying Research Center to get up-to-speed about the problem and what you can do, read this one. Hinduja, S. & Patchin, J. W. (2021). Cyberbullying fact sheet: Identification, Prevention, and Response. Cyberbullying Research Center. Retrieved [insert date], from https://cyberbullying.org/Cyberbullying-Identification-Prevention-Response-2021.pdf Download PDF (NOTE: We have a much older version of this Cyberbullying fact sheet available here, in case you were looking for it or had linked to it from another site: https://cyberbullying.org/Cyberbullying-Identification-Prevention-Response.pdf) The post Cyberbullying Fact...

(For a formatted .pdf version of this article for distribution, click here]). Sexting is when someone takes a naked or semi-naked (explicit) picture or video of themselves, usually using their phone, and sends it to someone else. Some teens participate in sexting voluntarily as a way to flirt or be intimate with a romantic partner, while others might be coerced or manipulated into sharing explicit images. Due to the varying nature of sexting incidents, care should be taken to address the behavior in a way that minimizes harm of the person depicted. Below are ten tips to help parents deal with sexting when it occurs. 1. GATHER INFORMATION. Your first task is to determine what happened. Did your child send an explicit image to someone else or receive one? If received, is the image of the sender, or someone else? If your child received an explicit image from the person depicted, instruct them to delete it immediately, and have them convey to the other person that must never send content...

I pick my son up from school most days, and from his first day of kindergarten I got into the habit of routinely asking him two specific questions: 1) “How was your day?” and 2) “Was there any bullying?” I’d ask the latter question with a conspiratorial raise of my brow—as if asking him if they’d served Five Guys burgers for lunch in the cafeteria. These daily interrogations started out as a lighthearted way to get my son to talk a little about his day, although I was also genuinely interested in the nature and extent of bullying at his school. He’d sat in the back row of enough of my presentations starting at an early age to know the basics of bullying and other trouble kids can get into at school and online. I didn’t expect much in terms of content for my research in the stories he would tell, but more than anything my goal was to open up a line of communication between him and I on this topic that most kids don’t like discussing. I hoped that these early low-stakes conversations...