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The American public greatly esteems their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but generally understands poorly its true ambit. Unfortunately, this defect in understanding permeates American educational institutions, from the lowest grades to higher education and even professional schools. Students’ pervasive ability to engage in technological speech and expression further complicates the issue, especially when inappropriate or offensive speech originating outside school crosses the geographic boundary and enters school. School administrators at all levels, challenged with maintaining atmospheres of safety and security conducive to learning, are being asked to respond to such student speech, but they fear to exceed the limits of their authority. Cyberbullying and harassing communications continue to distract victims and educators and detract from the quality of education at all institutions. The legal system and judiciary provide little guidance, and what guidance there is suffers from lack of consistent definitions and conflicting analyses. This chapter will review the jurisprudence pertaining to the First Amendment as applied to the school setting. The emphasis will be on legislative, judicial, and societal responses to cyberbullying and cyber harassment in the school setting, from the elementary level to higher education. Finally, recommendations for policies and procedures for dealing with cyberbullying and cyber harassment in schools will be presented.

In this chapter, we explore an actual incident of cyberbullying that occurred at a large Canadian university. In our analysis, we frame cyberbullying as part of the more general phenomena of classroom incivility. We focus on the sociocultural context and demonstrate how the structures and processes within the classroom environment can enable incivility as well as cyberbullying.

This study presents findings leading to the conclusion that cyberbullying in massively multiplayer online (MMO) games can be conceptualized, measured and at least partially explained as a normative phenomenon, similar to Latane & Darley's (1970) bystander inaction hypothesis. An overall sample of N=372 respondents to an online survey provided information on their daily amount of Internet use and daily amount of time engaged in playing in MMO games. Scales for the assessment of both cyberbullying victimization and bullying itself were developed. Victims of cyberbullying appear more sensitive to bullying incidents albeit no more likely than game players who have engaged in bullying to intervene in preventing it. Perpetrators of cyberbullying, however, also appear to be heavily invested in both Internet use and MMO game play and that could amplify an individual's aggressiveness as a player in turn making it more likely they will engage in cyberbullying. The study concludes with a qualitative examination of MMO game player narrative self-explanations for nonintervention in cyberbullying that parallels Latane and Darley's explanation of bystander nonintervention in face-to-face threatening or emergency contexts.

On September 22, 2010, a young man stood in distress on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge not far from his home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, looking 600ft below at the Hudson River. He was ready to act on the decision he had announced just minutes before on Facebook. His first semester at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, located 27 miles southwest of New York City, had brought an unexpected challenge: his roommate had streamed two live Internet videos of his intimate encounters with another man. These were very private moments, and it was simply too much to bear. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death, leaving behind broken-hearted friends and family members, and shocking an entire nation with his tragic story (Kolowich, 2010; Foderaro, 2010).

Tyler probably had no idea how his death would shed light on a serious college issue – cyberbullying. In this chapter, the authors address this issue in detail. This is done first by providing a review of relevant literature that defines cyberbullying, explaining its presence in higher education, and describing various factors that should be considered when dealing with it. The literature review includes discussion regarding key electronic resources that college students use to cyber bully, as well as various legal and judicial issues that relate to this cultural phenomenon. Following the literature review, cyberbullying is examined through a research study at Ohio University, a large public institution located in southeastern Ohio. This is accomplished by setting forth research questions and hypotheses, describing the research instrument and design, and explaining the findings from an Ohio University undergraduate student survey. The chapter concludes with suggestions that practitioners might consider implementing on campus, as well as recommendations for future research on this topic.

In this study, we aimed at examining the unique and interactive effects of peer violence in cyberspace on adolescents’ emotion regulation and socioemotional adjustment, as well as the mediational role of resilience in the link between adolescent’s pathogenic relational experiences and behavioral outcomes. Specifically, we intended to explore emotion differentiation and regulation in reaction to bullying perpetration and victimization and in terms of positive (proud, confident, good) and negative (ashamed, excited, guilty), Passive (sad, embarrassed, humiliated) and Reactive (angry, scared) emotions and how it impacted and predicted positive and negative outcomes.

A stratified convenient sample of 494 Italian students aged 13–19 years (M = 15.27, SD = 1.23) was selected to represent all different school types in Italy and the students were administered a self-report questionnaire on school bullying involvement. General Linear Models, ANOVA, and T-tests were employed to explore gender differences, the relationships between variables, and their contribution to the predictive model. A two-step Cluster analysis was used to profile adolescents based on patterns of resilience, health outcomes, and cyberbullying involvement.

Results showed significant gender differences, with females using internet and Facebook more than males and being more resilient, positive, and prosocial, but also responding to victimization with higher levels of alienation, anger, humiliation, and psychosomatic and emotional symptoms. Males perpetrated peer violence more than females, were less likely to be victimized, and were generally less emotionally impacted by it. Victimization rates (63.7%, n = 296) were higher than perpetration rates (51.7%, n = 233) and bully-victimization was prevalent (47.1%). Victims prevalently experienced passive emotions (sadness, humiliation, embarrassment) while perpetrators experienced negative ones (guilt and shame). Cluster analysis evidenced different pathways and trajectories of resilience and cyberbullying involvement: Resilient victims (RV), Healthy uninvolved (HU), Healthy Bullies (HB), Alienated Bully-Victims (ABV), and Resilient Bully-Victims (RBV). RV, HU, and HB resulted all well-adjusted, despite the different involvement in cyberbullying, and also RBV and despite the double involvement in cyberbullying, ABV were the only maladjusted and at-risk group in our sample characterized by very low Positivity, very low Resilience, and extremely high Alienation.

This study proposes a comprehensive, developmental, ecological, relational, and self-regulatory resilience approach to cyberbullying, which represents an innovative and advanced contribution to the literature with significant implication for research and practice. Fully understanding and measuring the emotional impact of cyber peer violence and resilience following cyberbullying victimization and perpetration can help in developing targeted interventions for both victims and bullies. This study highlighted the need for a self-regulatory model of resilience for modulating emotions, arousal, and behaviors across contexts, relationships, and difficulties. It also evidenced that moderate levels of resilience and positivity are sufficient to buffer youth from involvement in cyberbullying and to predict healthy adjustment and less pathological outcomes.

By profiling adolescents based on resilience levels, health outcomes, and cyberbullying involvement, we evidenced five distinct trajectories of risk evaluation for cyberbullying beyond participating roles. Our results confirmed the fundamental importance of assessing resilience and emotion regulatory resources together with peer violence involvement in identifying and targeting adolescents at risk.

To analyze the emergence of cyberbullying in the news and to unveil the extent to which this new social problem is being constructed as a moral panic.

Ethnographic content analysis is conducted on a sample of 477 local and national newspaper articles published from 2004 to 2011. Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s five criteria of a moral panic – consensus, concern, hostility, disproportionality, and volatility – are used as a lens to analyze how this issue emerged in U.S. culture.

News coverage of this issue erupted within a very short time period, drawing important attention to a previously unknown social problem facing youth. Yet in the construction of cyberbullying as a new threat to social order, the news coverage sometimes inflates the magnitude and severity of the problem. In doing so, the media work to misrepresent, misinform, and oversimplify what is a more complicated and perhaps not yet fully understood issue among youth today.

Electronic aggression is something that is of growing concern to children, parents, educators, and policymakers. Evidence has begun to show that its effects may be as harmful as face-to-face bullying. Since the media play a vital role in the designation of certain issues as worthy of the public’s attention, it is pertinent that this information is presented in an accurate fashion, rather than simply promoting a moral panic around the topic.

Future research should move beyond print media to examine how TV, popular culture, and social media sites construct this problem. This should include research on the public’s understanding and interpretation of these mediated forms of communication.

In order to gain a rich understanding of the phenomenon of cyberbullying among college students, we conducted a series of focus groups on the campus of a large southwestern university. Employing a grounded theory approach to the data analysis, major themes emerged. The roles of sender, receiver, and audience member are very fluid in the cyber-environment. Misinterpretation and miscommunication can result in unintentional cyberbullying; audience comments can easily escalate a benign comment into a major incident. Focus group participants generally believed that the receiver's interpretation rather than the intent of the sender determines whether a communication constitutes cyberbullying. Because of the potential for misinterpretation of messages, anyone can be a (perhaps unintentional) cyberbully. Participants believed that the anonymity of the Internet encouraged cyberbullying, as did the desire for instant gratification and impulsivity. Students who are different in some way (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and appearance) are perceived as being more vulnerable to being victimized in cyberspace, and students with high profiles (e.g., athletes and student government officers) were also noted as likely targets. Despite being able to describe the dynamics of cyberbullying in detail and provide numerous examples of it happening in the campus community, members of the focus groups were reluctant to characterize cyberbullying as a problem at their university and uncertain whether the university should intervene. They did, however, offer many suggestions that will be useful to universities seeking to develop policies, educational programs, and intervention strategies for their campuses.

Education scholars have recognized the current cohort of university students as the “always-connected generation” (Bull, 2010). As a result, selecting appropriate and yet targeted teaching tools for this generation is both “challenging our notion of a teaching environment” (p. 634) and raising questions about how to best “mitigate the negative impact of new technologies on learning” (Billsberry & Rollag, 2010, p. 635). One of the negative impacts that arise from the intersection of technology and education is cyberbullying. It is this extremely important and often difficult to predict element of online-based communications – cyberbullying – that serves as the focus of this chapter. The chapter is divided into three main sections. First, we present research regarding the prevalence, forms, and associated consequences of the mobile and online technologies being used by young people today. Second, we provide a definition of cyberbullying as well as a discussion of its pervasiveness and ways to address it. Finally, as a tool for moving forward with respect to the issue of addressing cyberbullying in university environments, we describe a university-based service-learning project aimed at increasing students' understanding of the variety of forms and the severe consequences of cyberbullying.

Despite growing attention to the prevalence and consequences of cyberbullying within the social sciences, research on cyber-bystander reactions has been largely overlooked. Drawing from Latane and Darley’s (1970) bystander engagement model, the current study sought to fill this gap by exploring how common it is for adolescents to encounter cyberbullying on social networking sites (SNS), how youth react to the cyberbullying witnessed on SNS, and most importantly to uncover factors that may be related to two potential bystander trajectories on SNS, namely traditional bystanding and prosocial bystander engagement.

Data was drawn from the 2011 Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project (Princeton Survey Research Associates International, 2011). The secondary analysis was restricted to only adolescents who ranged in age from 12 to 17. Grounded in existing research on face-to-face bystander behaviors, two Ordinary Least Squares regression models were run testing which independent variables (age, gender, frequency of SNS use, perceived peer norms, and prior cyberbully victimization) were related to traditional and to prosocial bystander behavior online.

Approximately 88% of youth reported they’ve witnessed a cyberbullying exchange on an SNS. Among these witnesses, the majority reported engaging in both prosocial (62%) and traditional (74%) bystander practices. Based on the regression analyses, a key factor for bystander practice online appears to be observed peer behavior.

The findings from this research provide an initial exploration into cyber-bystander behavior, with potential implications for both future research directions and cyberbully prevention programming.