More than half of teens in the US are being bullied on the Internet

Calling and spreading rumors have long been an unpleasant aspect of adolescent life. But the proliferation of smartphones and the growing popularity of social networks have led to the fact that the Internet has become the place where most of the insults occur.

Фото: Depositphotos

New poll Pew Research Center showed that 59% of teenagers in the US have personally experienced at least one of the six types of online abuse.

The most common type of abuse young people face online is name-calling. Some 42% of teenagers admitted to being called offensive names online or via mobile phone. Additionally, about a third (32%) of teens say they have had false rumors spread about them online. Fewer teenagers noted that strangers (other than their parents) constantly asked about where they were, where they were, or what they were doing (21%). 16% of respondents admitted that they had become the target of physical threats on the Internet.

Text messaging is the main way to interact and maintain connections between teens, but sometimes the interchange is very offensive. A quarter of the teenagers said they were sent explicit images that they did not request, 7% noted that someone published their explicit images without their consent.

The overwhelming majority of adolescents (90%) called online harassment a problem that affects people of their age, and 63% said that this is a very serious problem.

During the Pew Research Center survey, 743 surveyed a teenager and 1058 parents living in the United States, surveys were conducted from March 7 to April 10 2018. Teenagers in the study are persons from 13 to 17 years.

The survey revealed that girls are more likely to become targets for the spread of false rumors and online threats, some other forms of bullying occur to the same extent in the lives of adolescents of both sexes.

Overall, 60% girls and 59% boys experienced at least one of the six forms of abusive online behavior. At the same time, about 39% of girls say that someone spread false rumors about them on the Internet, while only 26% suffered from boys.

Girls are also more likely than boys to get overt images that they did not ask for (29% versus 20%). The purpose of these types of messages is especially often older girls: 35% of girls aged from 15 to 17 have stated that they have received unwanted explicit images; 20% boy became victims of the same type of bullying.

40% adolescents admitted that they experienced two or more types of abusive actions on the Internet. Girls more often than boys were victims of several different forms of online bullying. About 15% of adolescent girls were subject to at least four types of bullying compared to 6% of boys.

In addition to these gender differences, adolescents from lower-income families are more likely than children from richer families to experience certain forms of online bullying. For example, 24% adolescents whose household income is less than 30 000 dollars per year say that they were the object of physical threats on the Internet, compared to 12% adolescents living in families with an annual income of 75 000 dollars.

The likelihood of adolescents facing violent behavior also depends on how often adolescents surf the Internet. About 45% of teens say they are online almost all the time, and these regular users are more likely to experience online harassment. 67% of adolescents who are online almost constantly are cyber-bullying, compared to 53% of those who use the Internet several times a day or less.

Most teenagers believe that their parents do a good job of countering online abuse. But other groups, in their opinion, cope with this task much worse. Parents are the only group for which the majority of teens (59%) expressed a favorable view of their efforts.

Young people have a particularly negative view of how politicians are handling the problem of cyberbullying—79% of teens say elected officials are not doing a good job of addressing the problem. Many teens also view negative efforts by social media (66%), other users who witness online harassment (64%) and teachers (58%).

Most parents are confident that they are raising their child so that he behaves properly on the Internet, while a significant proportion of them are concerned about the negative experiences that their children may encounter on the Internet. Approximately six out of ten parents admitted that they are worried that their children may be harassed or harassed on the Internet (59%), and that they can send or receive explicit images (57%).

At the same time, parents of teenage girls are somewhat more likely than parents of boys to say that they are worried that they will be bullied by their children on the Internet (64% versus 54%) or they will participate in the exchange of candid images (64% against 51%).

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