(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Today there was a talk about Cyberbullying that revealed some really fascinating information. Elizabeth Englander from MARC (the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center) game a very spirited talk with some good statistics from her group's studies.

• Grappling is the name for either staging a fight or ambushing someone and recording it to upload to Youtube later. There has been at least one suicide as a result of these attacks where a girl was attacked, stripped, and violated with the entire episode uploaded to Youtube.
• When asked what the motivation was for being a cyberbully, kids (ranging from middleschool to college) listed mostly either "because it was fun" or "because I was angry". The most interesting thing about this statistic is that it broke down almost perfectly along gender lines. Can you guess which is which? Boys did it for fun and girls because they were angry.
• There's at least one school district where the teachers have threatened to strike unless they are allowed to collect cellphones at the door. This comes out of situations like the one where the students provoked their teacher on purpose and recorded his angy reaction for upload to Youtube.

Another very interesting thing that Elizabeth said due to a question about the effectiveness of Public Service Announcements about cyberbullying was that, in her state at least, they held a contest for teens to create public service announcements that would get the message out to people of their own age. That's brilliant! As the commenter in the audience said, the "This is your brain on drugs" and "I learned it by watching you" PSAs from our youth were really more of a joke than anything. Teens are probably best equipped to create something that their peers will pay attention to.

You can find out more about MARC at their website.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

If you've heard of Rev. Wright (Barack Obama's pastor) and the things he's reportedly said, you should probably know that there's a video of the sermons where you'll find he didn't actually say what was reported.