TORONTO - The popularity of instant messaging and social networking websites like Facebook have given rise to new forms of cyber-bullying and there's no sign of the trend slowing down, according to a new study released Wednesday by Kids Help Phone.
Despite widespread media attention and ongoing educational efforts to stamp it out, an online survey of nearly 2,500 young people found 70 per cent of teens reported having been bullied online while 44 per cent said they've bullied someone else.
More than three-quarters of respondents were female and more than half of them were aged 13 to 15.
Instant messaging proved the most common platform for bullying, followed by e-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
Donna Hansplant of Kids Help Phone, a telephone counselling service, said she was most surprised by how naive young people are about cyberspace.
"Socially, they really aren't sure how to behave and interact in the cyber-world,'' she said. "There are no generations before them that they could learn from and kids learn from modelling.''
Hansplant said teens will often do things like allow strangers to film them without realizing the images could be widely distributed.
"It's this whole attitude that the kids think... they get to know people really well on the Internet, but they don't really know who they are,'' she said.
"It's an incredible amount of information and skill these kids need to navigate through and were just catching up all the time just to try and understand it as well as they do so we can help them with it.''
Kids Help Phone unveiled its findings to high school students in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
