UTS, The Great Hall, Thursday 18 March 2010 Dr Rachael C. Murrihy & Megan Varlow
Introduced by: Dr Antony Kidman, Director UTS Health Psychology Unit

Start of transcript

Tony Kidman:

I think we ought to get started. We're following a fairly, hopefully, tight schedule so everyone can get home and watch whatever.

I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Tony Kidman and I've been at the UTS for a long time. I'm the Director of the Health Psychology Unit and I'm very pleased that you've decided to come here tonight.

The registrations that we had for this talk have been quite significant in numbers and a very complex, not complex but interesting group of people from schools, from universities from business and various other areas including, I believe, people from the New South Wales Police Service. So there's obviously an interest across the board in this topic and, of course, many members of the community who have children, perhaps, who have been subjected to this kind of unfortunate treatment at times.

Tonight's lecture is the first in the series this year of the UTS series called Speaks Out and I'm delighted that the work that we do has been selected and I think it's good that academics not live in ivory towers. There's a tower here, as you know, but it's not ivory and many of its people that occupy it are keen to let people know what we do here and, particularly, our work we like to think is relevant to everyday experience and we carry out research and treatment working with young people suffering from a range of mental health disorders, and some of them very serious.

Let me indicate that this lecture is being digitally recorded and also videotaped to be later aired on the ABC2 Big Ideas television program. So, if you turn your phone off completely to assure that no electronic interference occurs - I better do that - we'd be most grateful.

As I said, tonight's topic I think is very timely. There's a growing concern in schools, the media and in the broader community about cyber bullying.

My two colleagues here, Dr Rachel Murrihy and Megan Varlow, work with me in our research and treatment programs dealing with young people, mainly adolescents or young adults, with a variety of mental health disorders.

That's what the unit does and there's information on us in the handout there at the door, and I'd be very pleased if you'd take one so that if you do need to contact us and, also, you'll receive a summary of what's being shown here tonight, what's going to be discussed here tonight.

As the emcee I'll try and make sure that we stick to the timetable, and I'm watching myself at this point, but I would like to say that we'll have a period for questions and there'll be a roving mike so that people can ask a question. Our scheduled finish time is approximately 7:45 and a question time for maybe 10 minutes or so and, if it runs slightly over, we can do that, but not too much.

Rachel is a senior clinical psychologist who's been with me for some years. She's conducting research, large scale research programs into mental health. She educates and trains clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, she's worked on this area, family doctors, nurses and others.

She's a practicing clinician. She's delivered many lectures. She's no armchair, well she is actually, psychologist. I mean that's what you are. You sit in the chair listening to people, so that's the essence of a psychologist is to be working with people, listening to them and, hopefully, offering them solutions and treatment strategies and cognitive behaviour therapy, which is the model we use, I think has been very useful in this program.

Megan is also a clinical psychologist and she's also a health psychologist and she's done a lot of large scale research into cyber bullying and stress and literacy with adolescents. She's worked in public and private practice and I'm very pleased that these two colleagues and members of the unit are going to present to you tonight.

Now I've just reached the end of my allotted time, so I'll hand the first part of this talk tonight to Megan.

Megan Varlow:

Thanks, Tony.

Rachel and I are going to tag team a little bit tonight so you don't get too bored with either one of us.

What we're going to start off with is we'll introduce the topic of cyber bullying by looking at some case studies, trying to answer the question of how does it happen and what does it actually look like, to give you a bit of a flavour for the sorts of things that we see in cyber bullying.

Then we'll move on to what does the research say. We've just finished a research project with about 1400 adolescents in New South Wales so we'll talk about our research, but also put it into the context of other research that's been going on both in Australia and internationally.

Then finally we'll discuss some implications for practice and talk about where we see the field heading in the future.

But first off, what actually is cyber bullying? The best and most accepted definition is from Patchin and Hinduja in 2008 and they say that cyber bullying is wilful and repeated harm inflicted through the means of electronic text.

Here I've highlighted the important bits in red. So you'll see that for cyber bullying to be bullying, it has to be repeated. Receiving one mean text message, yes it's very distressing, but it's not classed as bullying.

The other thing is the electronic bit. It could probably be extended to, say, electronics means because you can use both text and image as a way for cyber bullying and, hopefully, some of the examples that you get, that we talk about today, that will sort of fill that out a little bit more.

A little bit, too, about some bullying terminology just so that we all are talking about the same thing. There's two types of bullying; direct bullying and indirect bullying.

Direct bullying is the sort of traditional bullying; punching someone, kicking someone, calling them names to their face, that sort of thing. It occurs in a face to face setting.

Indirect bullying is where there is no direct confrontation so it's things like spreading rumours, trying to break up friendship groups, telling people sort of Chinese whispers behind people's back, that sort of things happens. Social exclusion is another common form of indirect bullying.

With the key feature being no direct contact, cyber bullying fits into this umbrella of indirect bullying because, in most cases, people who are cyber bullied never actually meet face to face, in this context, the person who is bullying them.

So that's just a little bit of terminology.

The other thing is that there has been a lot of media attention, especially in the last probably 12 months about the seriousness of cyber bullying. So if you would do a Google search on just straight out cyber bullying, you'd get upwards of a million hits. If you make it a bit more specific and you write cyber bullying Australia, you get maybe 300,000 or 400,000 depending on how good your spelling is; if you make cyber bullying one word or two.

The other thing is that it's something that the mainstream media has picked up, so this is from ABC News Online earlier in the year; a story about two girls from a school in Sydney who were expelled from that school for cyber bullying on their MySpace page. Sunrise on Channel Seven recently had a campaign against bullying that included cyber bullying and they received about 30,000 signatures of people taking action against cyber bullying.

So it's definitely an issue that I'm sure you've come here tonight because, partially, the media has played a role in informing you about it.

So what I'd like to do now is to just tell you a couple of stories.

Megan was a 13 year old girl from Missouri in the USA who committed suicide in 2006. Megan's story shocked the world. Megan Meier believed that somewhere out there was a boy named Josh Evans who was 16, owned a pet snake and Megan thought that he was the cutest boyfriend she's ever had. However, all was not what it seemed with Josh.

Megan met Josh via MySpace, a popular internet social networking site that's popular with adolescents.

They flirted for a few weeks but never spoke on the phone or met in real life. Megan was very taken with Josh and told all of her friends at school about this new boyfriend that she'd met on MySpace. Her friends and family reported that her spirits had lifted and she seemed happier as she'd previously been depressed. However, after a few weeks of chatting on line with Josh, the tone of his messages changed. He started to say things to Megan like I don't know if I want to be friends with you anymore as I know that you're not nice to your friends. He called her names, that I won't repeat, and said things like the world would be a better place without you.

On 17 October 2006, Megan went to her room and 20 minutes later she was found hanging in her wardrobe. Despite desperate attempts to revive her, she was pronounced dead the next day.

Now after Megan's death it was discovered that Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan's school friends, had created the Josh Evans MySpace account. Josh was not a 16 year old boy, but a fictional creation of Lori and her daughter.

This is an unusual cyber bullying story as mostly parents don't get involved in the bullying, but it's certainly one that had catastrophic consequences and it illustrates the role that social networking sites and the anonymous bully can play in this form of cyber bullying.

I'll now hand you over to Rachel.

Rachel Murrihy:

This next case study has been voted the number one viral video of all times. This clip has been viewed over 900 million times on the internet. It's actually still on YouTube today if you have a look and it brings up the issue about internet service providers, despite having rules against derogatory material on these websites, they only sort of take them down inconsistently.

This clip has been extensively reported in the mainstream media and there's been spoofs and references on a number of high rating TV shows.

So what's the video? Well many of you probably already know it. It's the Star Wars Kid video. For those of you that don't, I'll tell you the story about John. John's an overweight teenager from Canada and he never imagined that an afternoon's fun filming himself with a Handicam in a studio at his high school would result in such a devastating outcome. With the camera running, John, solely for his own amusement, pretends to be a character from Star Wars using a gold ball retriever doubling as a light sabre sword.

In a move he later regrets, John forgets to take it with him leaving it amongst the tapes and, unfortunately for John, the tape didn't remain there for long. His friends, after discovering the tape, seized the opportunity to upload the two minute video clip onto the internet where it was an instant hit.

Over the following months John's taped spawned edited versions, so people added the Star Wars music and the lights and the sound, spoofs and spinoffs.

The result for John? Well John dropped out of school and he finished semester in the psychiatric ward and the last I read is that he's still under psychiatric care indefinitely, so it's quite an awful outcome.

John's parents actually sued the families of the boys that were involved and they settled out of court, but what was interesting, I thought, was the submission that the parents made to court. They said that obviously John's education was compromised, but they expected that his subsequent employability would also be affected and they were looking at changing John's name.

So bullying in the old sense might have meant that you got called names in front of, say, 10 or 20 people out in the schoolyard, but cyber bullying has really raised this to a whole other level. You think of this clip being viewed 900 million times. It's an enormous amount of humiliation. Even for an adult that sort of international humiliation would be difficult to cope with, but for adolescents in the developmental stage that they're at, it's near impossible. The next case that we've got, or the last case study that we're going to talk about today, is Marie.

Marie, 14, sits on her bed in tears. I can't face school. Mum just doesn't get it. Everybody hates me.

Two weeks ago, Marie dropped her boyfriend and classmate, Gavin, because he'd become increasingly possessive. Shortly after, Marie received many abuse messages from Gavin saying that she was a whore. Marie responded by blocking Gavin and that seemed to work, but then a friend told her that Gavin had put up a blog.

So a blog is an online journal, much like a diary with entries. The only difference is that a blog is interactive, so other people can write in their online comments.

So, Gavin had put up a blog detailing their breakup, painting Marie as a slit who had slept with many people while she was going out with him. At school, girls looked and laughed at Marie and the boys called her names.

Desperate to get the blog down, Marie contacted the ISP, the internet service provider, and they took it down but the harassment didn't stop there. Marie's friend forwarded her a photo of a porn star that Gavin had Photoshopped onto Marie's head and sent. He'd sent this Photoshopped picture out to his entire contact list.

Marie also started to receive weekly emails from Weight Watchers. Gavin had signed her up knowing that she was sensitive about her weight.

Marie felt under siege and, not knowing what else to do, refused to leave the house.

I think what's interesting about this case study is that it pulls out some common patterns with bullies. Fifty five per cent of bullies bully through multiple sources.

The intimidation also tends to morph and escalate into a number of different forms, as shown by Marie's case.

So let's move onto cyber bullying methods for digital immigrants.

Who are digital immigrants? These are people who have grown up, who have known a time without digital technology. So these are people who have known a time without mobile phones, without computers and you might even remember a typewriter.

Digital natives on the other hand are people, Generation Y onwards, who have grown up with digital technology.

So how do they bully? Well they bully via mobile phones and the standard way is via text messaging. But now that we have iPhones and Blackberries, mobile phones are essentially the same as computers so they can bully through mobile phones using emails and social networking sites.

So bullying through computers, bullies use instant messaging. So, instant messaging or Microsoft Messenger is a real time communication between two people, so teenagers sit at their desk at night doing their homework, a message pops up. So a person is actually online at that very second, they write back to them in real time and communicate that way. This is instant messaging.

Email; we all know what email is.

Social networking sites; these are sites like Bebo and Facebook where a person can put up their personal profile, a profile that they feel represents them. They might put up information about their date of birth, their interests, their hobbies. They might post photos with their friends or family.

Then you've got official websites. These are things like school websites and other websites like Blogs and YouTube and you've got interactive computer games. So one game player can actually talk to another person they're playing the game with via chat or via live internet phone.

So what do they do? How do they bully? Well they send mean, humiliating or threatening messages or posts. They can send these messages directly or they can send them indirectly, so the case we saw in Sydney over the last week where a boy put up some racist comments on his Facebook site that were actually meant to bully a child of the same race at his school.

The messages can be the bully can make him or herself known or they can anonymous. They can also send embarrassing or explicit photos, sexting, like we saw in the case the Fevola affair this week.

You can have two 14 year olds, for example, in a relationship; one takes the photo of another semi-clad. They can send that photo around to their friends, but they can also upload that video clip or photo onto the internet and within minutes this can be downloaded internationally.

So, essentially, you can ruin someone's reputation in a matter of minutes. It's quite frightening. They spread rumours. They directly exclude others. So on Facebook you have the ability, once you've accepted someone as a friend, to exclude them off your friends list, which is akin to dropping a person from your social group.

You can forward emails without consent. Megan and I are emailing each other, Megan says something mean about another one of our friends and I forward that email on to that friend. That's an example of forwarding emails without consent.

Flaming. Now flaming is a term used, it's a general term, it's used widely. It's meant when someone sends an offensive or emotionally provocative message with the purpose of baiting the person so that they will flame back and then the two are then in a flaming war. Now often when the person flames back, that person can use that email or text against them.

Then you've got impersonation, so you can steal user names and passwords. If I steal your user name and password I can get on your Facebook website or your social networking page and put racist, sexual or inappropriate remarks up there.

Also I think we had a case in Sydney in the last couple of months where a girl went away. Someone stole her details and when she came back they'd sent out mean messages to all her friends and everyone hated her when she returned from holiday.

You can also create fake accounts. So say for example Megan has an account that says megan@hotmail.com, I create a new account meganv@hotmail.com and send mean messages around to her friends and people are unlikely to notice the difference.

Polling is interesting. This is where a person, say for example, on their blog puts up a poll for their classmates, or perhaps even the whole school, saying vote; who's hot, who's not, who's the biggest slut, who's this, who's that.

You can send viruses or spyware with the purposes of spying on a computer or destroying the computer. Trojan horse programs allow you to control another person's computer externally and you can actually use that control to erase their hard drive.

Lastly, here you've got text wars. This is where a group of people get together and decide to bombard the victim with either text messages or emails. This is called a text war or a text attack.

The important thing to take away from this slide is that these methods are constantly evolving and this is the reason really why cyber bullying is so hard to stop because it can morph into so many different forms and it's really only limited by a person's creativity and their technical expertise.

So we've talked about how people cyber bullying. Let's now move on to why cyber bullying is a problem.

The saying sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me sort of underlines this commonly held perception that to be physically attacked is actually worse than emotional abuse. Certainly we see some of these beliefs in cyber bullies.

Up here, when they were asked why they bullied, these were some of the answers they gave which, I think, give us some insight. Just teasing. I was just kidding. It doesn't hurt. It's not serious. It's not real. So they tend to minimise the seriousness of the impact on their victims.

Then you've got teachers as well. At least historically, there's a lot more training going on now so teachers are getting more updated, teachers have held the same beliefs and we see studies that show that teachers have less empathy for victims of indirect bullying than direct bullying.

But the health effects are serious. If we look at traditional bullying first of all we can see that victims report increased rates of mental health problems; anxiety, depression, low self esteem. They have also higher rates of academic problems; they get poorer grades, they have poorer attention and they have physical problems and also they report suicidal ideation.

Now Alison and colleagues from Flinders University did a study where they surveyed 3000 Australian adults and they asked them if they'd been bullied earlier in life and looked at the outcomes. What they found was that those who had been bullied, and that was one-fifth of the sample, said that later in life they experienced poorer physical and mental health than those that hadn't been bullied.

So, so far the short term research is really indicating that cyber bullying has at least, the effects are at least similar to that of traditional bullying. There's some emerging research that's actually indicating that covert bullying, this indirect bullying, may actually have worse mental health effects, but we can't make any definitive statement about that yet.

As far as cyber bullying goes, in the long term the jury's out. We don't have any longitudinal studies so we look forward to getting those so we can see what the effects are in the long term to see if they're similar to direct bullying.

Megan Varlow:

So this is back to me.

People who are direct bullied say that home is a safe place. If they're getting bashed up at school, once they get home they're safe. It provides a refuge from the bullying.

But with cyber bullying, home is no longer a refuge. The ABS tells us that about 73 per cent of Australian adolescents have their own mobile phone and up to 93 per cent have access to the internet at home. They're not keen to turn them off and so they're always open. They never have a safe time or a safe place where they're not going to be cyber bullied. So cyber bullying is in escapable. It's something that they can't run home and be safe from.

Another reason that cyber bullying is a problem is that it can be anonymous. A recent study by Ybarra and Mitchell revealed that 84 per cent of bullies knew their victim, so they knew who they were bullying, but only 31 per cent of victims knew who it was that was bullying them.

Was it someone that they've never met or was it their best friend who then, when they turn up to school the next day, pretends like everything is fine and you don't know who to trust. Is this your friend who's sending you these horrible messages? Is it some random person that you've never met before? That can breed uncertainty and increased worry as well.

The other thing with the anonymity issue is that it's more difficult to catch someone if you don't know who it is. Who do you report to your school or to you parents? You can't say Rachel was bullying me if you have no idea who it was.

By mobile phones; so you can go to K-Mart or Target and buy a mobile phone prepaid for $20, $25 and use the included credit to send messages to someone. You may just pick the number out of the air or you may copy the number carefully out of your phone and use it to bully one of your friends anonymously.

So, the fact that cyber bullying is inescapable and can be anonymous makes it more of a problem than more traditional direct bullying.

This is just a cartoon that illustrates that fact; as long you have access to the computer you have access to being bullied.

The next problem with cyber bullying is that parents often lack the technological skills to be able to assist their children. Sometimes kids are a couple of steps ahead. For example, they can hit the minimise button when they hear their parents walking outside their bedroom, so they get down the site that they're not supposed to be looking at, or they can send a PRW message on MSN so even though their parent is sitting over their shoulder watching, PRW means parents are watching so no one writes anything remotely out there if you know that parents are watching. So you talk about your maths assignment on MSN rather than who did what at school that day.

The other issue is that students might restrict their parents' access. So parents know that it's important to check out their MySpace page, important to check out their Facebook page, but they may not know that you can have different settings. You can have a private setting and a personal setting and you only give your mum or your dad access to your public setting so they can see what the entire world can see. They can't see this second level where you do the things and you say the things that you don't want your mum and dad to see.

The other issue is that quite often parents will set internet use rules at home, so things about frequency, what sites it's okay to visit, how it's okay to use the internet, but then a lot of students report that even though those rules are in place there's no monitoring to see if it actually happens.

This is the 20 per cent of seven to 14 year olds reported that they visited a site that they knew they weren't supposed to be visiting. One in three have an online friend that they've never met. So this is some random person who's sent them a message on MySpace, said would you like to be my friend and it's a bit of a competition among adolescents to see how many friends you can actually have. If Ashton Kutcher has a million friends on Twitter then maybe I should try and do that as well.

So they accept lots of people into their friendship groups that they've never met. Is it really a 13 year old boy who goes to a school around the corner, or is it a 25 year old man that you've never met? You can't be sure.

There's also been some confusion as to who's responsible for intervening. So is it a school problem or a home problem? If I use a computer at my local library, where does that fall in? Who's responsible for that behaviour?

When you're dealing with young adolescents, there's also the issue of do they actually know what they're doing is wrong so that makes it more difficult when you're dealing with cyber bullying.

This is a cartoon from the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of weeks ago that accompanied an article about a school in Queensland that decided the best to target cyber bullying was to ban all technology. So students had to check their mobile phone in as they came in to school, they didn't use computers at school. So you ask how sustainable is that sort of ridiculous policy and how likely is it to actually teach students a better way to be able to interact on the internet and deal with cyber bullying? As you can see, it doesn't always work.

There's also the question of well why do they cyberbully in the first place. It's an issue that is really quite tricky and it's received some mixed attention in the research. In the direct bullying literature, finding out about why people bully is quite difficult. It's hard to get the square straight answer and it's a little bit the same in cyber bullying.

However, Bebo recently did an anonymous online survey and because of that they actually got a lot more response than they expected.

You can see on the slide that there were various reasons reported for engaging in cyber bullying. Some of them were expected, like in revenge or in response to face to face bullying that's happened at school.

However, an interesting reason that was reported is that they might cyber bullying for entertainment or to get a reaction from someone else. It's not a reason for direct bullying that we see in the literature, or at least it's not a reason that people report as to why they punch someone in the face just for entertainment. Cyberbullying in this way can also be used as a way to bolster your own social standing; your friends laugh when you do this sort of thing so that pushes you up the ladder a little bit. Or it could be to bolster your own self-esteem, to make you feel better about yourself by putting someone else down.

Essentially, there's no one reason why one person would cyberbully another and we know that in a lot of the cases that we've seen cyber bullying happens for a combination of reasons. It could be a little bit about revenge and a little bit about bolstering my own sense in my social circle and a little bit accidentally; maybe I just forwarded the email when I didn't mean to. So there's a combination of reasons.

So just to summarise this first section; why is cyber bullying a problem? We know that cyber bullying has a serious effect on mental health. It's often inescapable, anonymous, not recognised as bullying, especially by adolescents but, in some cases, by parents and teachers. It's hard to police or to regulate and it's not an industry that's very well regulated at the moment.

These factors combine to make cyber bullying a bit of a silent enemy, something that's difficult to properly target or to refine your interventions towards. It's also quite early days, so it was three years ago that Rachel and I sat down and decided to start doing some research into cyber bullying and at the time there were probably six papers that had been published about cyber bullying. There's been a little mini explosion but we're still talking in the hundreds. It's not like anxiety in adolescents where there's been thousands and thousands and thousands of studies conducted. So it's still early days.

Rachel's now going to talk a little bit more about the research.

Rachel Murrihy:

I'd like to tell you a little bit more about the research that we conducted at the Health Psychology Unit.

We gave surveys out to 1438 students. There was a pretty even gender divide. They age ranges were 12 to 18 years and eight schools participated, so these were high schools, and we had a mix of public, independent and Catholic schools, and this was a convenient sample.

What we found was that one-fifth of the sample had been victims of cyber bullying, so one-fifth had been victims of cyber bullying and 13 per cent admitted that they had cyberbullied others.

Let's have a look at other Australian research and see if this is consistent with what already has been out there. The annual youth poll, which came out in 2008, was organised by Senator Natasha Stott Despoja and this is a poll for 15 to 20 year olds. It's sent out to schools, TAFEs, universities, welfare organisations, churches and charities.

What they found was that 22 per cent were threatened or upset by someone online. It was quite similar to the figures that we had.

But a year later we had the Australian covert bullying study which is the largest study that's been conducted in Australia by Donna Cross and colleagues at Edith Cowan University. They had a younger cohort so they were mid primary school to mid high school, a younger than ours study, and they found that seven to 10 per cent were victims of cyber bullying, so the rates were slightly lower.

So cyber bullying is clearly a problem in Australia, but what about internationally? Well we have research papers from the US, the UK, Korea, Japan, India and Canada and what we see are that the rates are ranging in the prevalence rates from about five to 25 per cent.

The rates differ so much because the definition for cyber bullying differs amongst research studies. So in our study we required that the cyber bullying must be repeated and that it must have happened over the last three months whereas in Natasha Stott Despoja's study they just had to have been threatened or upset at any time and there was no repeat criteria. In Donna Cross's study they required repeat criteria and asked students if they had been cyber bullying in the last term. So what needs to happen is that researchers have to adopt some uniformity in terms of the definition so that we can get more solid prevalence rates.

Let's move on now to gender and cyber bullying. Who cyberbullies more, boys or girls? Well they're equivalent. Girls and boys cyberbully at equivalent rates and they are cyberbully victims at equivalent rates also.

Why do girls cyberbully? Well, for the most part, it's relational bullying. So they cyberbully to humiliate or to ostracise people from their social group. Boys? The purpose for the most part again is sexual harassment. It's homophobic bullying or unwanted attention towards girls or sexual coercion.

Now 50 per cent of girls bully with friends. This is really important and has important treatment implications as well. Cyberbullying is a spectator sport. Thirty per cent of men also bully with friends there.

Age and cyber bullying? Well we know that cyber bullying peaks in the first few years of high school. Now with direct bullying the bullying usually declines at around the age of 15 years because people expect by that point that you will have the social skills to deal with social problem solving situations rather than just using aggression. So there's social pressure at that point.

Now cyber bullying follows this decline but it's not as steeply as with direct bullying.

As you get older there's more bullying through the social networking sites and less bullying through the mobile phones and text messaging.

Megan Varlow:

Profiles in cyber bullying. The final question is who actually gets bullied and who does the bullying when we're talking about cyber bullying. If you think about profiling bullies and their victims, you get quite a big list and you'll notice that from the way that this is presented that there's a lot of crossover. There's a lot of similarities between bullies and their victims.

Mainly this is because there's a large proportion of people who fit into both camps. So about 75 per cent of people are cyberbullies and cyberbully victims, so there's a lot of overlap in that area.

You'll also notice from this list that there's some variables specific to the individual, but also variables that are more specific to the system. For example, an individual with a favourable attitude towards cyber bullying, who thinks it's okay, is more likely to cyberbully others.

On a system context, a school climate where bullying is acceptable, and this could be because bullying isn't acknowledged or it's not followed up in a systematic way or action isn't taken against bullies when they're identified, the chances of cyber bullying in a school with that sort of environment is higher than a school where bullying is clearly not acceptable and everybody knows.

School cohesion is also a strong predictor of cyber bullying. In a school that has significant conflict between teachers and students, between students and parents, between parents and teachers and among those groups as well, so within group conflict, those schools also have higher rates of bullying in general, but cyber bullying more specifically.

It's likely that this contributes to making it difficult for the school to create a school climate where bullying is not acceptable.

Unsurprisingly, access to the internet is also a really important predictor of cyber bullying; the more access you have to the internet and the more easy access you have to the internet. So wireless internet in your home is a stronger predictor than just internet in your home.

Owning your own mobile phone, you're more likely to be a cyber bullying victim than if you just borrow a phone off mum or dad when you go somewhere by yourself. Cyberbullies are more likely to have some social skills deficits compared to their peers and are also more likely to bully others face to face. They're more likely to be victims of cyber and face to face bullying themselves as well.

Cyberbullies are more likely to report feeling lonely and less connected to their schools and the community so connectedness is something that's protected against bullying. Without that, they're more likely to engage in it.

However, overall we're really not that great at predicting cyber bullying and there's probably two reasons for this. The first one is that there's such a big overlap between who gets bullied and who does the bullying and, also, we've only so far got a few pieces of the jigsaw so we're just starting to get a good picture and, with further research that looks at predictors and profiles, we should be able to predict a little bit more accurately who will bully and who will be a cyberbully victim.

Rachel Murrihy:

Next we're going to talk about what to do about cyber bullying. First of all, there's been a lot of focus on cyber safety strategies. I'm going to talk briefly about these.

Both parents and teachers can actually download cyber safety strategies from this address at the bottom in the red and it's not a bad idea just to read over these strategies and to start an open discussion with your young person about what they know about these cyber safety strategies.

So first of all you're wanting to teach them to protect their personal information. You don't want them to give out their full name, their address, their phone number or any identifying information. If they're writing a blog and they say that their down at the Tiger's Netball Club every Saturday, if someone was harassing them they're letting people know where they are. So you have to be a little bit careful about this.

You team them to keep their login information secret and to use different passwords for different accounts, and also to only admit friends to social networking pages. So you'll get a request from a person who wants to be your friend; it's only admitting people that you actually know.

Facebook also has certain privacy settings as well where you can let the whole public access your site for example, you can let only your friends or friends of friends. The privacy settings are on a page, there's probably about 15 settings you can go through, and it's a great tip for parents just to open up this page with their young person and go through the privacy settings. It's just a nice forum for a discussion. It's a good jumping off point if you like.

You're wanting to teach teenagers stranger danger principals with regard to cyber bullying, so just get them thinking. Megan was saying before, a lot of people are talking to people they don't know online. How do you know that that person you're talking to online is actually a 13 year old boy from a nearby school and it's not a 25 year old man who's preying on you? How do you know the difference?

You're also wanting to teach them etiquette. This is just citizenship skills. Would you speak to someone like that in real life? It's reminding them that whatever they post is up there for life, so would you treat someone like that in real life? And think before you post. This is this concept of avoiding flaming. Don't write or send anything when you're heated, when you're emotional. Take some time out before you go back to answer that email.

This, by no means, is an exhaustive list. You'll find a lot of cyber safety strategies and, like I said, if you look up one of those websites they'll give you some details.

Now 95 per cent of students tell us they know about cyber safety strategies, so that sounds really good but what we found out from our study was that only 36 per cent use them always. So we actually have big room for improvement here.

We asked victims what they did when they were cyberbullied, so how they responded. We got a couple of interesting findings. You'll see up on the left hand side here that about one-fifth took no action. So of those who did nothing at all, 60 per cent of those students said the bullying either continued or got worse. So taking no action really isn't a very good option.

Down this end we've got 52 per cent of the sample, so about half, blocked the sender. This tended to be the most successful action, but really it's only a partial solution.

Now what was also interesting about our data was that very few people actually told teachers and told their parents. With regard to the parents, we think it's because young people, well we know through research, didn't believe that parents could actually do anything about it. They were also very concerned that parents would take away their online privileges, which is akin to social suicide for a teenager.

Teachers, the same. The belief is there from the students that they don't think the teachers can do anything to help. In one study we saw that when students told teachers, 50 per cent said the teacher helped and the other 50 per cent said it made no difference or it actually made the situation worse.

I think a lot of teenagers, from other studies, really are telling friends so perhaps they're getting their emotional needs met there.

Let's move now onto prevention programs for cyber bullying. Like Megan said, there's been a mini explosion of research that's happened over the past few years and now we know a lot about the phenomenology of research, so we know what is cyber bullying, how do people cyberbully, what are the prevalence rates, but we know very little in terms of what is effective with regards to prevention programs.

So there's a lack of evaluation research on preventative approaches to cyber bullying, but experts in the field are united in that they recommend strategic, comprehensive and integrated programs that are based on traditional bullying programs but they have the addition of the cyber bullying specific components.

We're not talking about a reinventing of the wheel here. We're just talking about adding cyber bullying specific components to bullying programs that are already in schools. Direct bullying, the traditional bullying, the programs that are already in schools we know are modestly effective in decreasing bullying.

Megan and I are advocating a whole school approach, so once again this is with regard to prevention programs. Now the goal of these programs is to create a positive, supportive, pleasant cohesive environment for everyone that's in it because we know that bullying is created, or there's a higher prevalence of bullying, in schools where there is a lack of cohesion, where there's conflict.

We'd like to see clear school policies, so we want policies that discuss cyber use and how technology should be used, so rules around technology use. We need codes of conduct that talk about the pro-social values and morals and, also, in these codes of conduct there should be clear procedures to be followed.

These can really just be an adjunct to an already existing bullying policy in terms of the code of conduct.

Megan Varlow:

These programs really have three main components. The first one is training for teachers, then there's training for parents and then, finally, training for students themselves.

Now the training for the parents and the teachers has quite a few similarities so I'm going to start by talking about the two of them together.

Firstly, parent and teacher training programs need to focus primarily on increasing awareness of the extent and impact of cyber bullying. So, for example, if a parent or a teacher believes that it's a serious problem they're more likely to take action to stop it from happening in the first place, but also respond in a way that's more akin to the seriousness of the problem when it's reported to them.

The second thing that these programs aim to do is to educate parents and teachers about the importance of social networking to this age group. Rachel said that cutting off internet privileges is akin to social suicide in this age group. It's almost like you're banning them from talking to their friends outside of school time.

Our study actually showed a decrease in telephone use compared to previously reported research, but a huge increase in mobile phone text message and internet use. So adolescents are now communicating with their friends primarily over the internet using their mobile phones. They don't talk for hours on the telephone like they used to. They type for hours on the computer to chat with their friends.

So these programs really put an emphasis on explaining the importance for social relationships and also identify formation so that parents and teachers can really understand how important social networking sites can be when used appropriately.

Together these two activities, the raising awareness of cyber bullying and showing the importance of social networking, are designed to help parents and teachers to break down any barriers that there might be towards taking action with cyber bullying and to encourage monitoring and appropriate use of the internet and mobile phones.

Teacher and parent training programs also educate about cyber safety strategies. So if a teacher or a parent is trying to tell someone about the proper use of cyber safety strategies they have to know them themselves, to provide some education about that and also to emphasise the importance of teachers and parents modelling or being good role models in terms of strong conflict resolutions skills, but also in terms of net etiquette.

So, for example, if you receive an email from your teacher that says your assignment was late, fullstop, send; not the nicest email. You wouldn't say that if you met them in real life. The teacher would say hello, John, I haven't got your assignment yet, are you planning on handing it in anytime soon? They wouldn't just walk up to them and say your assignment's late and then walk away. So the way that we email is a good way to model as well.

But there's also some differences between programs for parents and programs for teachers. Parent programs need to explore a little bit more the issue of internet use rules at home and help parents to think about how they may implement them in their home.

For example, how do you discuss with your 16 year old that you are going to put these rules into place? How do you say to them you're not allowed to randomly search Google for whatever it is that you're looking for; there are specific things that you can use the internet for; there are specific times that you can use the internet; there is a limit to how much time you can spend on the internet; eight hours every night not acceptable?

For some adolescents they consider that to be normal, so how do you implement rules if that's what they've been doing.

Also, the importance of parental monitoring. This doesn't mean sitting over someone's shoulder and checking out everything that they're doing the whole time, but what strategies can you use and how do you communicate to your adolescent that it's important for me to know what you're doing. Just like I ask you how did you go at school and expect more than just nothing, you expect the same when we're talking about the internet as well; what are you looking at, what's going on and, as a parent, I need to be able to check that.

The other thing that parents can play a role in is in terms of updating and maintaining antivirus software, so most 14 year olds are really not interested in that. That's a role that parents can play, and also using internet filters when you've got younger children. We know the Australian Government filter was hacked quite successfully by a 16 year old a couple of hours after it was released, but if you've got nine and 10 year olds it's a really good idea to use a filter. It makes your job a lot easier.

In terms of teacher programs, some of the things that are specific to those programs are how to communicate the school's policy to students, how to monitor that in schools. So if you're at a laptop school, the way that your policy works will be a lot different to if you're at a school that just has computer labs and students can just use it at a particular time.

So the way the school policy operates is really dependent on what that environment is like.

Also, providing teachers with support on how to follow up on a policy violation, so does the teacher themselves do it, is there someone in the school who's responsible for that and what are the standard steps to follow if a policy violation is witnessed.

It's really about trying to open up communication lines.

Something that's here in the parent column but also is about the student column is thinking about keeping lines of communication open about the internet so if a student or a child is bullied on the internet they feel that they're able to go to their mum or go to their dad or to go to a trusted teacher at school and let them know, so discussing what sorts of things that you might be looking at on the internet, like Rachel suggested, going through the privacy settings of social networking sites.

Most 14 year olds again are really not interested in privacy settings on the internet. They can sit there with their mum if she makes them go through it all and at least then mum is certain that the settings are set.

Rachel Murrihy:

You could even start the conversation, can't you, by asking how many friends have you got on your social networking site. It's a badge of honour to have a lot of friends and then that sort of leads into a hundred friends, wow, you know every one of those. So you just ask questions and head towards an open discussion about this.

Megan Varlow:

Yes, and that's also something that can happen with teachers as well in the way that are you using email to communicate with your friends at school when you're sitting one table away from them; have you thought about maybe talking to them instead of sending them an email. So trying to discuss how the internet fits into our life is a good way to keep those lines of communication open.

But there's also actually providing some training for the students themselves. So, like we looked at earlier, lots of students will say things like it's not real, it doesn't count, it's just teasing, so actually providing them with some hard evidence about well actually this is bullying. Sending someone 50 messages that say you're a slut, that's the same as going up and saying that to her face or punching them or something like that. So making it really clear that cyber bullying is serious and it's not okay.

Also empowering students to deal with cyber bullying; lots of schools run anti-bullying programs that teach students how to respond if they are bullied. We need the same components in terms of cyber bullying. What should you do? Learning about cyber safety strategies, learning how to block, how to contact an internet service provider, what to say if you're sending an email to a game administrator to report some bullying; what do you actually do? Sort of nuts and bolts stuff for kids about how to act when you are cyberbullied.

Along the same lines there's some really good evidence to support the role that bystanders can play in indirect bullying and cyber bullying. Intervention programs need to encourage bystanders to not be bystanders, but to take action to prevent or to intervene in cases of bullying.

There's been some really good research in the indirect bullying field that shows that outcomes are best, both psychological outcomes for the victim but also for the bully, outcomes are best if the bullying is stopped by intervention from peers. It's the idea that we talk about with students that bad things continue to happen unless good people do something, so to get them to intervene when they notice bullying leads to a better outcome for all.

Student training programs also need to contain things like conflict resolution and assertiveness skills, but in most schools these are covered in other programs like peer support or leadership training, personal development, those sorts of things.

We don't do it all over again. It's just about reminding students that these principles also apply when you're living in an online world, so you don't say horrible things to people in real life, you don't say horrible things to people on the internet. Or, if you're having a fight with someone there's a constructive way to resolve that argument. There's also a destructive way and being able to make that choice, to make that differentiation and then choosing the more helpful way to behave.

Student training programs also contain empathy building exercises and citizenship skills which, again, are quite often covered in other programs but we're talking about making sure that students know how this applies to the cyber world, how you should behave, what is a good way to respond if, for example, someone sends you a very inflammatory message, replying really hot under the collar is probably not going to make the situation better. So, trying to equip students with readymade strategies for this is what you might want to do in this sort of situation.

We know that the key to program success is intensity of effort and persistence over time. These programs you don't measure how they're going in weeks or terms, but you look over years.

It's also important to review the program and make sure that it's actually working. It could be something reasonably straightforward like doing a behaviour audit and looking at incidents before the program was implemented and incidents after the program was implemented. It could be doing a whole school survey using a web based survey engine like Survey Monkey, sending it out to parents, to teachers, to students. The website itself actually collates all your data and spits out a report for you, so it's a relatively easy way to evaluate programs and relatively cost effective, too.

The other thing is that you want to do this because how on earth do you know if you programs are working. The behaviour audit one, where you look at incidents, if you get a decrease in cyber bullying incidents then you know that your program is starting to be effective. If you get a bigger decrease over time, as students move through the years, then again that's very helpful.

We know that there's been limited evaluation of the large scale direct bullying programs and that's one of the few sort of holes in that literature, so what we're very much into looking at now is making sure that programs that are implemented are evaluated so we have that evidence to be able to say this works, this doesn't work so well.

So we're almost at the end now. Just to summarise, cyber bullying is relatively common. Twenty per cent, one-fifth, of adolescents are victims of cyber bullying at some stage through their adolescence and about 75 per cent of those, so about 15 per cent, will be bullying other people as well.

Cyberbullying is difficult to escape. There's no safe place. As long as your phone is on, as long as you have internet, as long as your friends have their phone on and have internet, you might turn yours off and then you get to school the next morning and they say oh goodness, did you see what was on Mary's blog last night. So even turning them off doesn't protect you entirely.

It's also constantly evolving. So the case of Marie that Rachel talked about earlier shows that how if one method doesn't work then it escalates to the next method. I send a mean text message, I don't get the response I'm looking for, I set up a blog, I post something on YouTube, I take a poll, I do some Photoshop work, things just keep getting higher and higher essentially and there's a little bit more scope for escalation in cyber bullying than there is in more direct bullying.

We also know that cyber bullying is harmful to mental health and development. It can lead to further mental health problems, problems with things like self-esteem and identity formation also are important in this area.

We know that cyberbullies and cybervictims have very similar profiles, so when we're talking about intervention programs we need to make sure that we're not blaming the bully. Taking a more restorative approach to resolving these sorts of programs allows you to help both the bully and the victim.

Cyber safety strategies are essential. They're sort of like your first line of protection. If someone knows all of your passwords they're much more likely to try and hack into your accounts than if they have to sit there and try and guess them for 10 minutes. If you make it easy for someone to cyberbully you chances are there's someone out there who will probably take that opportunity.

Rachel Murrihy:

Cyberbullying interventions need to be comprehensive, integrated and take a whole school approach. This probably should say whole community approach because it's not just the job of the school; it's the job of parents to get involved, it's the job of organisations like libraries to have a policy that shows if you're at our public library using our equipment, this is the code of conduct that we expect, this is what will happen if you don't follow these guidelines.

They need to involve everyone who's involved and they need to be delivered over time and evaluated periodically. Something that we're seeing now is the way that students in Years Five and Six this year view cyber bullying is quite different to the way that students in Years Five and Six four or five years ago viewed cyber bullying.

For the kids in Years Five and Six at the moment, they know about it, they've heard about it, it's not a brand new things, it's something that's sort of a little bit normal essentially. While that's a little bit sad it also gives you a bit more scope because it means that you can say well this is something that's going to happen, it is something that you're going to have to deal with and so just like you wouldn't take a lolly off a random person in a white van while you're walking home from school, you also wouldn't accept 50,000 people as friends on your MySpace page. So, making stranger principals, for example, directly applicable to the internet from when you first learn them in primary school.

It's about trying to make the approach as vast as we possibly can, and research is continuing.

Here's a list of some resources that you might find helpful. You don't need to madly write them all down. If you haven't already collected one there's some small handouts near the door that you can just grab on your way out and they have this list.

The cybersmart website is from the Australian Government and that provides links to all the others, so if you just want to choose one that's probably the one to start off with.

Like I said before, most of the social networking sites do have good safety and security and privacy information, so Bebo, a site that's really popular with younger adolescents, probably has the best safety and security information up there, but it's a little tiny grey tab right down the bottom corner. No 11 year old is going to check it themselves so it requires someone to point them out and take them through the steps together.

That's actually all that we have for you tonight. We're going to ask Tony to come up and facilitate some questions if anyone's got any.

Thanks.

End of transcript
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