Scott Rhee's Reviews > School Climate 2.0: Preventing Cyberbullying and Sexting One Classroom at a Time

Cyberbullying and sexting are problems that continue to grow in our nation's schools mainly due to the ever-changing advancements in technology and the inability for schools to keep up with it. It doesn't help that many adults---parents, teachers, and administrators equally---don't know how to recognize the problem and probably wouldn't know what to do if they did.

Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin's "School Climate 2.0: Preventing Cyberbullying and Sexting One Classroom at a Time" is a good reference for parents and teachers. Written more for educators, parents of students who may be being cyberbullied or are cyberbullies will find some useful information.

Bullying, which is still a serious problem in schools, used to be defined as the aggressive behavior and harassment by one person or a group of persons, carried out repeatedly over a period of time, involving a power differential. It's the power differential that's significant: generally the strong picked on the weak, the big picked on the small. With the advent of technological advances such as computers and cellphones, the power differential isn't as significant. Anyone can be a bully, and anyone can be bullied. Not only that, but traditionally bullying occurred solely on school grounds, during school hours. Home was a safe area. Not anymore. Cyberbullies can attack anytime, from anywhere.

Sexting, for those who don't know, is the sending or receiving of sexually explicit texts or nude or semi-nude pictures or videos via cellphone or other forms of technology. Recent studies have found that a significant number of teenagers have sexted, and that sexting becomes more frequent as teenagers get older. Those naughty little selfies teens send to their significant others can often be copied and disseminated to many other people. What many kids don't know is that, owing to the fact that most of these kids are underage, their sexts, if found, fall under certain child pornography statutes. Sexting could conceivably land kids in jail and have a "sex offender" status permanently attached to their record. It may not be fair, but it is the law, and it has happened.

One of the things that schools can do, according to Hinduja/Patchin, is take a proactive approach by implementing strategies for creating a more positive school climate, one in which students feel that teachers sincerely care about them, where misbehavior is monitored and dealt with in a fair and consistent manner, where students feel that they are being better prepared for the future, and where they feel safe and secure. Research has indicated that schools with positive school climates---as rated by students and teachers---have a marked reduction in incidents of cyberbullying and sexting.

While somewhat dry in its writing and overloaded with statistics (it is a textbook, after all), "School Climate 2.0" is nevertheless a useful resource for the latest research on an issue that probably won't be going away anytime soon.