Spiteful Texts The Cruellest Form Of Bullying

Spiteful Texts The Cruellest Form Of Bullying

Teenage girls prone to impulsively sending spiteful text messages need help from schools and parents in curbing what it is one of the most hurtful, insidious forms of bullying, says a Massey psychology researcher.

Jim Sanderson, a former schoolteacher, conducted a study to determine which personality traits were related to text bullying among 13 and 14-year-old girls in New Zealand and Canada. He found a lack of impulse control was one of the main factors behind a tendency to bully via text messages.

Text bullying is different and potentially more damaging to victims than other forms of cyber-bullying, such as threatening or hurtful emails, because cell phones can be used anywhere, anytime, says Mr Sanderson. “The anonymity of the technology can embolden the bully because they do not see the immediate results of their actions and they can express more extreme forms of indirect aggression without immediate consequences,” he says.

Other factors he observed include girls being just as likely to bully friends as people they do not know very well. “Alliances shift in friendships and this may trigger bullying behaviour.”

Gender differences also explained girls’ proclivity for text bullying. “Girls are less likely to use physical violence and much more likely to use indirect violence. Girls hold grudges longer than boys do and they often involve others to “gang up” on the victim. Girls prefer to bully via technology rather than confront each other directly.”

Far less research has been done on aggression in girls compared with boys, which was one of his reasons for doing the study. He focussed on 13 and 14 year-old girls, as they can be more prone to bullying because of a lack of maturity. “They are going through a transition from childhood to full adolescence. Their social groups are opening up but they haven’t necessarily learned how to handle conflict.”

Some of the 210 girls he interviewed downplayed the seriousness of sending hostile text messages by saying they were “only joking.”

He says the rise of text bullying is occurring in a changing social context in which many 13 and 14-year-olds are more independent of their parents who do not always understand the technology their children are using. Teenage girls’ attitudes and sense of compassion may also be affected by increasing exposure to reality television programmes, which he says are “entirely based on taking pleasure in other people’s suffering and humiliation as an acceptable form of fun and entertainment.”

He identified characteristics of text bullying which reveal why it is worse than cyber-bullying;

• Text bullying can happen 24 hours a day and be perpetrated on the victim at home or in their personal space to an even greater extent than cyber-bullying because most teenagers depend on their phone for communicating with their friends and are very reluctant to give up or even turn off their phones.


• Unlike setting up a web page, text bullying can be done with very little technical skill.


• Text bullying can be done almost anywhere, regardless of what the person is doing at the time.


• Girls with low self-esteem will repeatedly ruminate on negative events (in this case reviewing text messages multiple times), which can result in depression.


• Text bullying is harder to detect than cyber-bullying because anyone can access a web page to determine if it contains offensive content. However a cell phone is treated as private property and requests to read an adolescent's text messages are often refused.


• Text messages can target multiple audiences and even focus on the friends of the victim in an attempt to isolate the victim. This directly attacks the victim’s support network. Messages posted on the web may not be seen by the victim or the victim's friends.
• Cell phones are ubiquitous, 95 per cent or higher in NZ. One study indicated that cell phone use among teens in New Zealand is over 100 per cent, meaning that many teenagers owned more than one phone. Computers are common (50-60 per cent) but nowhere near as universal.

Mr Sanderson recommends in his study that schools offer impulsivity and conflict training to students to reduce bullying.

Little research has been done specifically on the phenomena of text bullying, which Mr Sanderson says is more widespread than physical bullying and is a significant contributor to teen suicides. He did the study for his psychology Master’s thesis at Massey’s Wellington campus at the School of Psychology’s research laboratory, Children’s Environments: Research Unit for Behavioural Studies (CHERUB).

Caption: Jim Sanderson says teenagers need to learn impulse control to prevent text bullying.

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