Vanessa Rogers - Cyberbullying: Activities to Help Children and Teens to Stay Safe in a Texting, Twittering, Social Networking World

The vast majority of children and young people are computer literate and own mobile phones, providing them with almost unlimited access to information and the ability to keep in touch around the globe. Whether at home or in school, libraries or in Internet cafs, young people can utilize a vast range of digital communication tools to share experiences and keep in touch in a way that previous generations could only imagine.

However, there is a darker side to this shiny new digital world, defined as cyberbullying. This is when technology is misused to threaten, harass, humiliate or embarrass victims.

As access to digital communication grows, methods of cyberbullying have become more sophisticated. From nuisance phone calls to bogus websites, the victims of cyberbullies can be targeted with little effort and minimal cost to the bully, leading to widespread concerns about how children and young people can stay safe in a texting, twittering and social networking world.

How to use this book

This book sets out to help children and young people to be safe and stay healthy, to raise awareness about online safety, provide opportunities to help them understand cyberbullying, and define clear boundaries to online behaviour.

Suitable for parents of children and teens at home, or adults working with young people in youth clubs or school, all the advice and ideas in this book are designed to be inclusive, or easily adapted to meet the individual needs of each child. Some of the activities can be used with groups of around 8 to 15 children and young people, but can be altered to facilitate larger numbers or scaled down for you to explore digital safety with just one child.

No expert technological knowledge is required of you to be able to do these activities. They work on the basis of developing skills, attitudes and learning. This means that they encourage young people to reflect on their values and attitudes to cyberbullying and build personal skills that enable them to be assertive and develop resilience. It is hoped that this will enable them to make healthy, positive choices. Alongside this, factual information is offered in the following section, and sources of additional information are signposted at the end of the book.

The main part of the book is split into three sections: Warm Ups, which can be used to introduce the topic and spark interest, Activities, which explores issues in more depth, and Reviews, which enables you to consider what has been learnt. For teachers and youth workers, opportunities for recorded outcomes are indicated.

The book is written to be as flexible as possible parents can dip in and out of the exercises to increase their own knowledge and so help their children, and teachers or youth workers can use the session plans as stand-alone modules or together to build a wider curriculum.

Timings, which feature at the start of each activity, are offered as a guide, but these will need to be amended depending on the group size and ability the larger the group the longer the activity will take!