Canada Cyber-bullying Research

In a recent publication of Ipsos Canadian Interactive Reid Report, more than half of Canadian teens with online profiles have had some sort of a negative experience from social networking sites.  These types of experiences include others posting an embarrassing photo, hacking into their social networking account and pretending to be them and using their personal information to bullying them at school, home or work.  

In addition, about one in five teens from the ages of 12 to 17 years old have observed a friend or acquaintance being cyber-bullied through a social networking site. The report broke the statistics down even further and found, that younger teens and girls were higher to witness cyber-bullying.  It revealed that 25 percent of teens age 12 to 15 years old compared to 14 percent of teens age 16-17 years old witnessed cyber-bullying.  Also, about 25 percent of teen girls witnessed cyber-bullying compared to 17 percent of teen boys.

The first take away from this report is cyber-bullying is happening. The second is younger teens are seeing cyber-bullying more than older teens on social networking sites. Parents are not going to stop their teens from being cyber-bullying but what parents can do is educate and talk with their teens constantly about what personal information is posted and to let them know if someone starts chatting or posting negative or rude words.