ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the words of a 13-year-old girl. She wrote this account of being cyberbullied as a participant in the Youth Voice Project, a research project conducted by Davis and Nixon (2010) in schools across the United States. More than 13,000 young people in grades 5–12 answered our questions in winter 2009–2010, about bullying and about what helps youth who are bullied. Here is this young woman’s story:
One of the girls at school who wasn’t really a friend but wasn’t not a friend [of mine either] said really mean things about one of my best friends, then told her i said them, and she made a fake email account from “me” and sent my friends mean emails from “me.” I am no[t] friends with either of these girls anymore. A lot of kids still believe i did all that so i don’t relate very well to the popular kids of school anymore.
We know that not all children respond the same way to being bullied. As a result, we thought it was important to ask how severely she was affected by this behavior. From a multiple-choice list of options ranging from mild to very severe she chose “Moderate: It bothered me quite a bit.” We then asked what she had done about this problem. She wrote that she had tried “telling the other person or people to stop,” and things got worse. She also tried “telling the other people how I felt” and “pretending it didn’t bother me” and “reminding myself that it’s not my fault,” and that nothing changed after she did those things. She reported doing two more things: telling friends and telling an adult at home about what happened. Notably, after doing those two things, she told us things got better. She went on to explain in her own words. (Note: the questions asked in the survey are included in brackets before each of her answers.)