Latest Survey Results: Cyberbullying Summary

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Report on Cyberbullying

Smart girls decide for themselves™.

Who took this survey?

177 SmartGirl users responded to this survey during May 2007. Of those respondents, 164 identified themselves as girls and 10 identified themselves as boys. Almost half (86) of the respondents reported that they are the oldest in their family, while 21% said they were the youngest in their family. The two most commonly reported ethnicities were European (40%) and multi-racial (20%). Over 80% of the respondents to this survey live in either the United States, Canada, England, or Ireland.

SmartGirls, threatening?!?

When we asked Smartgirls, "How often do you send threatening messages to people?" we were glad to learn that most of you (43.79%) never send threatening messages or or have only done it once (27.81%). However, we were a bit surprised to learn that 14.79% of respondents send threatening messages once in awhile or everyday.

Of those that send threatening messages, most of them use instant messaging systems (17.54%), personal email (16.49%) or text messaging (11.93%). Most threatening messages are sent to friends from school (28.57%) or someone from school that the sender does not like (21.85%). Most of the time, threatening messages are sent because the person sending the message is angry at the other person (21.18%). The second most common reason is because the other person is mean to them and they are responding (15.88%).

How often do SmartGirls send threatening messages?

	count	percent
frequency of message sent	count	percent
everyday	11	6.51
once in awhile	14	8.28
seldom	23	13.61
only once	47	27.81
never	74	43.79

Are SmartGirls getting threatened?

Fortunately, 53.22% of Smartgirls are never getting threatened or being threatened less than once a year. However, that means that the other 46.78% of SmartGirls are being threatened at least once a year....and that worries us! The most commonly sent message is through IM (22.86%) and personal email (18.09%). Social websites are the third (16.19%) most common method used for threatening SmartGirls. Most threatening messages are about something that isn't true or insult a person's appearance.

Of those that are being threatened, 26.31% try to ignore the message and 26.72% respond directly to the person by sending a message back or confronting the sender in person. Surprisingly, only 13.36% talk to their parents about the threat. That's less than the percent of girls who talk to their friends about the message (19.84%).

Form of Threatening Messages

Vicious Rumors.

Rumors can spread like wildfire and when they do, most SmartGirls feel very angry. They also cause SmartGirls to feel helpless, sad, scared and hurt. 27.87% of SmartGirls deal with rumors being spread on the internet sometimes, often, or all of the time. And only 44.85% never have to deal with rumors about them on the internet.

SmartGirls felt like people may start rumors on the internet for many reasons, including just being funny, trying to get attention, for power, revenge, or just to be mean. Clearly there isn't just one reason, as you can see in the chart below.

Reasons Why People Might Start Rumors on the Internet

Cyberbullying Versus Bullying In-Person

Those of us working for SmartGirl thought cyberbullying was a huge issue, which is why we decided to post this survey. After reading your responses we are even more concerned. It is hard for us to believe that 81.81% of you believe that cyberbullying happens all of the time or often. Knowing this, we think cyberbullying is an even larger issue than we did before posting this survey. SmartGirl wants to do something about it!

How often does Cyberbullying happen?

What can SmartGirl do to help?

Although we haven't decided exactly what we are going to do (stay tuned!), many of you provided great ideas, including:

Give us links on how to stop it, true stories about how it happened to other people, and advice.

Give some examples of cyberbullying situations because some people don't know exactly what it is.

Have talks with school. Tell schools that if students are being cyberbullied they should have a way for them to bring the message into school and show the principal.

I think schools should take more responsibility over this sort of bullying, even though it probably takes place out of school hours. Maybe SmartGirl could help influence this at schools?!

There need to be better monitors on public sites, especially those that have forums to post your opinions. One major reason I think is a cause for this is online relationships, I personally know that there are MANY teens that retreat to the computer to find comfort from what goes on at home. There needs to be more help sites that are 'cool' enough for teens with problems to go to and find mentors and such. I find that the major reason teens like me do this is because they do not feel appreciated enough and doing things like this is just an outlet that allows them to feel like they are needed. PEOPLE NEED TO LEARN THEY ARE NOT ALONE. Doing things like this, I know some teens, friends, who have become VERY close to those people who talk to them online, this poses a threat to them because they really don't have any way of knowing if the person they are trusting is actually what they say they are, they could be a cyber predator. PARENTS need to step in, monitor what their kids do online, and also need to know that their kids aren't deleting the history or cookies, because if this is going on, it NEEDS to stop. From experience, I can say that what goes on online creates an entirely different life for the people who take their 'online lives/friends' seriously, if you don't know them face to face, be careful who you trust. Being always online and taking things that happen there seriously can REALLY screw up a teen's social life. It really can. It NEEDS TO BE SOMETHING THAT IS ADDRESSED.

I don't know. I could say that you should tell people to report it, but some people are scared when people cyberbully them so they won't say anything.

SmartGirl could set up a support group for victims of cyberbullying where victims from all over the world could talk and discuss what happened to them. I also think there needs to be some kind of provision for people who do the bullying to be helped out as they are obviously pretty troubled.

Teach us tactics on how to confront them.

Spread awareness, hear some stories, let people talk.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us!

Please remember that all web-based polls are not scientific because the pollsters cannot randomly select the respondents to participate in the surveys.