There are some great new statistics on children's and parents' use of technology in a study from the Family Online Safety Institute. Many of these are being discussed at their 2015 Annual Conference currently underway in Washington.

The release of the FOSI study prompted me to collate some of the many statistics we in SelfieCop have gathered about Sexting over the past year or so.

Download 'The Stats of Sexting' (pdf 1.8MB)

As more data on this topic is generated, analysis of how best to help children manage the challenges of smartphones & privacy will continue.


Note: Poster-sized copies of images in the report can be downloaded below:

• About SelfieCop poster  (pdf 700kb)
• Statistics poster (yellow)  (pdf 700kb)
• Statistics poster (blue)  (pdf 700kb)
• Statistics poster (green)  (pdf 700kb)

In many ways Cyberbullying is similar to old face-to-face bullying. There is still a power imbalance and an overwhelming sense of helplessness on the part of the victim.

And yet this newer form of abuse now regarded as far worse than the traditional type.

The term Cyberbullying was first coined by Canadian Bill Belsey to describe ...

"The use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others."

Some of the reasons that kids consider Cyberbullying to be so bad is that their abuse is often witnessed by a very wide audience, whilst the bully is shielded by the anonymity that the internet offers.

This adds a new dimension to the distress that 24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week taunting creates. And sadly, parental ignorance of what children are doing online means that abuse often goes unnoticed.

For example, 13% of Irish 13-14 year olds say they have been bullied on social networking sites (in contrast with 6% who were bullied face-to-face).

This amounts to tens-of-thousands of children who are suffering daily torment, and yet only 1 in 10 victims will inform a parent or trusted adult about it.
It is clear we need to do more to help those in need. For, as we'll see in our article, the cost of ignorance is much too high.

All the statistics and references above, appear in the SelfieCop research report "Selfies & Sexting - the perfect storm" on Selfiecop.com.

By nature, Selfies convey strong visual messages and at times these can be quite suggestive.

Social validation matters amongst teens. 

According to clinical psychologist Dr. A. Letamendi, Selfies provide a way for teens to find their feet with peers through sharing images and chatting/gossiping about them. However, that doesn’t mean that all such self-portraits are acceptable.

For example, a study by McAfee in 2012 found that of the 21.5% of teens who post photos online, 7.5% are in revealing clothing. And from there, the step to "no clothing" at all is very easy.

Sexting is defined as: “The practice of taking a nude or partially nude image of oneself and sharing it with others.” 

The challenge for teens is that they often act on impulse and don’t think through the consequences of their actions. As such, sexting has now emerged as a major phenomenon.

Indeed, Irish forensic psychologist Dr Maureen Griffin considers sexting to be a national concern with 1-in-4 Irish children as young as 10 years old partaking in the practice.

Additionally, a survey by Cosmo.girl (in 2008) revealed that 69% of teens have sent a nude or semi-nude picture or videos of themselves to a boyfriend or girlfriend.

The tragedy is that these images can be shared so easily. And one they are out in the wild, it is very hard to get them back.

(This is where SelfieCop can help. SelfieCop deters teens from "sexting" in the first place. Learn more about the SelfieCop App.)

Here are some more worrying statistics about the prevalence of sexting among young people:

References: https://www.selfiecop.com/research/index.htm

As Lori Andrews in the Institute for Science, Law and Technology in Chicago stated "Teen sexting is all a way of magnifying girls' fantasies of being a star of their own movies, and boys locked in a room bragging about sexual conquest. It's a perfect storm of technology and hormones." 

But like every storm, this one too has its victims. As you’ll learn in our next blog post, Sexting is ruining the reputations and futures of children around the world.

Download lots more stats in our summary report, SelfieCop - Stats about Selfies & Sexting (PDF 500KB)

Sigh. Remember the innocent days of 2010 when if someone said "Selfie" you might have thought they had a speech impairment?

The now ubiquitous self-portrait may strike us as a new trend among young social media users, in fact the word first appeared back in 2004 on photo sharing sites Flickr and MySpace.

Selfie is now defined by the English Oxford Dictionary (yes, it's official) as "A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website." 

Typically a Selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face and/or an individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.

A couple of stats about Selfies...

• More than 31 million Instagram photos are hashtagged #selfie (Pew Research Center, 2013)
• 91 percent of teens have posted a selfie online (Walker, 2013). 

Initially, most Selfies were distributed by SMS. 

However, costs and the availability of free alternatives have pulled youths towards apps instead. As well as Instragram, services like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik and the newer Facebook Slingshot now dominate.

As reported by Irish telecoms regulator Comreg, among those aged 12-15 an estimated 187 app-based messages are sent in a typical week - and still going up. In contrast, the number of texts has fallen by 30% since the start of 2012.

All this is kind-of to be expected.

Teenager’s inquisitive nature places them at the forefront of new technologies. They love to push boundaries and revel in the freedom that social platforms bring.

But, not all use is benign. 

As we'll see in our next post, the more nefarious trend of "Sexting" emerged almost as quickly as the original surge in Selfies.

Download our complete research report into Selfies & Sexting on our website, www.selfiecop.com

We just added support for KIK & MESSAGEME to SelfieCop.

Parents - you can now see photos or videos taken via those apps. Of course, the ARMS RACE never stops. We'll be adding ever more capability over the coming months.

Question ... Which apps would you like us to focus on? Tell us in the comments below.

Zoe is a bright young Irish teen. She has some challenging comments about parental responsibility - and the need for kids to have a private life.

"Parents are meant to be able to protect their children. This may be seen as overprotection to some people but to most it is okay, because the world of smartphones and internet has stripped parents of that 'privilege'."

Definitely worth reading.