Cape May County Prosecutor Cape May County Prosecutor Robert Taylor announced on May 26 that his office has charged 19 juveniles and 1 adult in a two-school sexting scandal. On April 23, a female student told school officials at the Lower Cape May Regional High School that nude photos of a friend were being shared…
Out of the far northeast of England comes a disturbing report, courtesy of a Freedom of Information request filed by the Daily Mail. Over the last year, the Northumbria Police have investigated a number of sexting cases involving children as young as 10, 11, and 12 years of age. The Northumbria Police force is one…
On April 30, the United States Department of Education released a report entitled “Student Reports of Bullying and Cyber-Bullying: Results From the 2013 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey.” The report contains good news on the cyberbullying front: The percentage of teens ages 12-18 who reported being bullied at school fell to…
A friend who works in the public insurance field alerted me to the sad news of the suicide death of a 12-year-old girl named Alyssa Morgan, a student at Southeast Polk Junior High School in Des Moines, Iowa. On April 3, Morgan hanged herself in her family’s garage after writing a short note on yellow…
Artist supply company Crayola, which recently celebrated its 130th anniversary, is struggling to get impressionable teens to stop using its colored pencils as DIY eyeliner. The trend is yet another example of the “P2P pressure” potential of YouTube. Amateur teen beauticians have posted numerous videos showing how they use cups of hot water to soften…
A team of researchers has published a paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest in which they argue that the vast majority of the so-called educational apps available today are the mental equivalent of junk food. The report, entitled “Putting Education in ‘Educational’ Apps: Lessons From the Science of Learning,” is available…
As I discussed in detail in Cybertraps for the Young, one of the most disturbing aspects of the digital revolution is that it has empowered children to commit crimes that once were exclusively the domain of adults. There is no better example than the fact that every single day, thousands of children around the globe…
Sixteen months ago, David Byttow and Chris Bader created an app called “Secret” that was designed to permit users to anonymously share information with other users, friends, and contacts. The app and the concept of anonymous gossip proved popular: Secret gained as many as 15 million users in a fairly short time, and at the…
My 30th College Renuion was held at Amherst College at the end of May, and I had the honor of being asked to participate in a panel discussion about the risks facing teens today. Here’s the description from the College Web site: Protecting Vulnerable Adolescents: Cyber-Bullying, Sports-Related Concussions and Other Tough Stuff Saturday, May 30,…
In a study of 370 parents released on April 25, 2015, more than one-third reported that their child was less than 12 months old when he or she began scrolling or manipulating a touch screen. In addition, over half said that their infants began watching “television” shows on a mobile device before turning 1. By…
