“Ghost apps, hidden apps, they’re everywhere and kids know about them,” Mike Harris, Jefferson County District Attorney investigator, told NBC Nightly News.
So what exactly are these “ghost apps”?
A quick Google search for vault apps gives you a number of different options that have similar functionalities. Some of them look like a normal calculator app, but once you type in a secret code, it takes you to a hidden page where you can store photos, video, and all kinds of personal information.
Investigators are saying at least 100 Canon City High School kids used such apps to share and store hundreds of nude and seminude pics with each other, including students as young as 13. Students involved in the case could face possible charges of possessing and distributing child pornography.
The New York Times points out such vault apps have been in the market since as early as 2012, and some are very popular, like Private Photo Vault, which is ranked the 28th most downloaded photo and video app on the AppStore, while an app called Secret Calculator Folder Free has over 800 reviews.
The bigger problem is that this may just be a tip of the iceberg. The NBC report stressed that other sexting scandals have been reported in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee recently, and that most schools in the US have seen similar cases in one way or another.
This is higher than in other countries, where one in five 13-to 18-year-olds reported being the target of online harassment, on average.
Almost half of the Irish teens said they felt helpless when it happened to them, with three in 10 admitting to feeling completely alone.
As many as 25pc, one in four, of those who had been cyberbullied went so far as to experience suicidal thoughts as a result.
The figures have emerged in a global survey of almost 5,000 teenagers across 11 countries, including Ireland.
It was conducted by pollsters YouGov on behalf of telecoms company, Vodafone.
Nine in 10 Irish teens said they would find it easier to cope with cyberbullying if they received support from their friends on social media.
However, four in 10 admitted that they would find it hard to find the right words to support a friend who was being bullied online.
The findings were released at the launch of Vodafone’s #BeStrong anti-cyberbullying initiative, which aims to build emotional resilience amongst teens online, and includes the creation of ‘support emojis’.
These can be used to convey compassion, sympathy and support when friends are being bullied online.
The emojis were designed by a panel that included Berkeley University, California, Professor Dacher Keltner, the psychologist who advised on characters for Pixar film ‘Inside Out’.
In a sign of social media’s growing influence on kids’ self-esteem, almost half of teenagers here “always or sometimes” feel disappointed if they don’t get a response quickly after they have posted.
The survey, by social media site Ask.fm, asked 206 Irish teenagers and their parents about their attitudes to social life online, privacy and cyber-bullying.
It found that Irish teenagers are almost twice as fearful of being laughed at for talking about a problem on social media as their teenage counterparts in the US. The most common embarrassments identified were romantic “crushes” and problems at home.
The survey also has some interesting findings about teens’ attitude to online anonymity. 46pc of Irish teens say that being anonymous online “allows them to share new ideas without the worry of being made fun of”, according to the survey. And 41pc of teenagers who have been bullied online say they are “more likely to talk about difficult topics online if they were anonymous”.
Only 5pc of Irish teenagers would talk about “difficult topics” on their public profile, compared to 50pc if anonymous, according to the survey.
Both teens and their parents say that bullying is more common in the “real world” than online, it claims. 43pc of parents have been told by their teenaged child that they have been bullied in the physical world compared to only 13pc who have been told about cyberbullying.
Seven out of ten teens told the survey that they would “step in” if they observed bullying happening online.
For parents, the main concern was apparently not about abuse or what their children might see or do while using social media services, but rather the amount of time they spend online (61pc) that could be spent on other activities such as homework.
But Irish parents are more cautious than British ones when it comes to monitoring their teenage childrens’ activity online.
Four out of five (80pc) of Irish parents say that they monitor their kids’ online activity, compared to just 55pc in the UK. And over a third of parents here (38pc) know their teenage child’s passwords and log into their accounts.
However, a third of Irish parents say that they don’t know how Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter works. These are three of the most popular social media services used by teens in Ireland.
It found that only a quarter of Irish teens feel the need to hide their social media activity from parents with three quarters claiming that they “rarely, or never” say something they will later regret online.
Ask.fm, which commissioned the survey, has faced sharp criticism in recent years over cyberbullying episodes on its social media service, which is largely used by teenagers. The company has recently changed its procedures, requiring mandatory registering for those who wish to remain anonymous.
The figures were released under the Freedom of Information Act in respect of those under 18 who had been investigated under the offence of taking an indecent photograph of a child.
‘Sexting’ means sending a sexually explicit photograph or message using a mobile phone through text messaging services or social sites such as Facebook.
‘Sending these images could land them a criminal record’
Des Mannion, NSPCC Cymru’s head of service, said: “It’s a criminal offence to share an indecent image of someone under 18 even if the person sharing it is a young person themselves.
“They need to be aware that sending images like this could land them with a criminal record.
“These statistics are only the tip of the iceberg because police won’t know about every incidence. We know that sexting is increasingly a feature of adolescent relationships and children do take risks online, sometimes without realising it.”
Children aged 14 most frequently investigated
The age ranges of the children investigated were between eight and 17 years old but 14-year-olds were the most investigated, with 14 instances.
These children would have been in Year Nine or 10 at school.
The majority of those investigated were “advised accordingly,” according to police. Others were referred to social services, made to complete restorative justice, or were the subject of a youth restorative disposal. Three received a youth caution.
No child was added to the sex offenders’ register.
The biggest medium used to send indecent photographs was texting but other websites and apps were used such as Facebook, App Me, Kik, Hot or Not, and Video Camfrog.
Police lessons
A South Wales Police spokesman said: “We work closely with schools on the issues of ‘sexting’ with lessons being delivered on this subject since 2014.
“The sessions have been well received and explain the definition of consent and the possible criminal record consequences of sexting.
“An important outcome of the work with schools has been the increase in the number of children who have sought advice from their teachers on the subject.
“Where offences are identified South Wales Police seeks to deal in a proportional manner and a range of outcomes are utilised to ensure children are not unnecessarily drawn into the criminal justice system.”
Help is available
Mr Mannion said advice to young people, as well as their parents and carers, was available such as ChildLine’s free ZipIt app.
He said: “It includes witty images and replies they can use when asked for an inappropriate picture to keep in control of the situation.
“Parents and carers concerned about their child’s activity online can also download our free Share Aware guide which contains advice to help keep children safe online, in apps, and on social media.”
Zoe Hilton, of the National Crime Agency’s Ceop Command, said they had been getting reports of harmful situations because of sexting.
Normal for teens – alarming for parents
She said: “With smartphones and tablets, and new apps emerging all the time, this behaviour is becoming quite normal for teenagers.
“But it can be alarming for mum and dad who might not know how to help when things go wrong.
“Information and advice on staying safe can be found at www.thinkuknow.co.uk – our education programme designed to help protect children and young people from sexual abuse and exploitation.”
Contact ChildLine on 0800 1111 or visit www.childline.org.uk for free confidential advice and support.
Bullying can start very early and can even be seen among kids who are still in pre-k.
According to Dr. Craig Bach, VP of Education for The Goddard School, bullying can have long-term consequences but the earlier children learn to respond to it the less likely it is to have long-term consequences.
Here are some tips from Dr. Bach about what children and parents can do to addressing bullying:
• Encourage children to take bullying seriously and work to make it stop when they see it occurring. Tell children not to ignore it because it usually won’t just go away. With your child, use creative intellect to find ways to make it stop. Think of it as a problem-solving opportunity.
• Don’t wait until a bullying incident happens to talk to about bullying with your child. Get used to discussing it so it is not so strange when it does occur. Let your child know it’s okay to talk to friends and parents, teachers, and other adults about anything that concerns them.
• Let children know they can talk to the bully if they feel comfortable. The can look the bully in the eye and tell them to stop.
• If talking to a bully doesn’t work, walk away from the bully. Don’t run, act scared or angry — things that often encourage a bully — just walk away calm and steady.
• It is helpful to hang out with other people and avoid kids who bully others. Children should make sure to have friends or a trusted adult around if they think they might get bullied.
• Children should talk to an adult they trust and not let bullying happen without other people knowing about it. This can be parent, relative, teacher, school counselor, or friend.
• Learn to recognize the different kinds of bullying and call it for what it is. Whether it is physical (getting beat up) or emotional (regularly being left out of a group or teased in a mean way), it is bullying.
• Don’t remain silent when other children are being bullied.
• There is no magic formula that will work in every situation. There are times when you will need to defend yourself. When those times happen, be calm and thoughtful.
• The effects of bullying will stay with children for a long time. Showing confidence and courage in the face of bullying discourages bullying, minimizes its impact. Encourage your child to respond to bullying in ways that will help him walk away feeling as courageous, smart and as good about himself as he can.
• Tell children that bullying happens to almost everyone so they don’t feel so alone.
There are several steps parents can take to help their children be prepared if they are bullied or cope with being bullied.
• Role-play with children.
• Don’t wait until a bullying incident happens to talk to children about it. Start early and talk regularly.
• Talk to school officials and make sure the school has an effective plan to prevent and respond to bullying behavior.
• Talk to children about bullying and ways to respond. Also, talk to them about avoiding becoming bullies or how they would respond if they saw another child being bullied.
• Recognize your child’s emotional responses to bullying. It is normal to be scared and upset after being bullied. Talk to them about it.
• Learn to recognize the signs of bullying and keep an open line of communication with your child. However, no matter the relationship you have with your children, there may be times when they are too embarrassed, upset or scared to tell you about it. Demystify bullying by talking about it openly and often.
• Talk about your own experiences with bullying, how it made you feel, and how you responded. If you wish you had responded in different ways or had discussed it with friends, teachers, or family members let them know.
A university lecturer who claims he was cyber-bullied by students has won the right to challenge his employer for allegedly failing to tackle the problem.
Simon Spacey, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Waikato, claims his life was made a “misery” by students who bullied and harassed him online, and that the university failed to put a stop to it when he complained.
He has taken the university to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) seeking more than $1.8 million in remedies.
Dr Spacey’s other claims include that the university failed to provide information about advancement, used different rules to assess him in performance reviews and re-interpreted intellectual property rights.
The university claimed his complaints did not amount to a personal grievance and were not raised within the required 90-day timeframe.
Dr Spacey told the ERA he was the victim of cyber-bullying attacks through fake websites, posts on social media, emails and publications in the student newspaper.
He claimed the attacks were “supported by staff at Waikato University and other universities”, that his employer had “failed to investigate his allegations”, and the cyber-bullying “made his personal and professional life a misery”.
He said he lodged a statement of problem in December 2014, more than a year after first alerting his head of department to the cyber-bullying. At that stage it had included posts on social media sites, including Reddit, and an abusive email. He believed students were responsible.
He told the ERA that in November 2013, he discovered “no one had actioned” his original complaint of two months earlier, but was advised to ignore the posts and emails.
Dr Spacey then informed the university he considered the online activity breached the university’s harassment policy, and amounted to a defamation of character. He wanted the university to take civil proceedings against the perpetrators and seek damages, as well as take disciplinary action against the students involved.
He was advised he needed to know the identity of the people responsible for the posts before making a formal complaint, the ERA said.
Dr Spacey later identified those he believed were behind the nasty posts, and laid a formal complaint with the Student Discipline Committee in November 2013.
The ERA heard he was told the body could not deal with the complaint and referred to the university’s harassment and bullying policy. He wrote to the university lodging a formal dispute, in which he described the bullying as “extremely hurtful, quite vicious, and specifically directed at him”.
Dr Spacey said it was “personally distressing”, and he felt there was a lack of support from the university. It was two months before the university responded, and decided to treat it as an employment relationship problem.
A university spokeswoman said the university believed Dr Spacey had been offered adequate support and it was unsure why Dr Spacey thought the attacks were supported by staff.
“Considerable time was spent investigating the allegations of cyber-bullying raised by Dr Spacey. No evidence was found of university staff being involved.”
The spokeswoman said there was a delay in responding to Dr Spacey’s formal dispute, filed in December 2013, because the concerns took time to investigate and the time of year meant that some of the relevant staff were on holiday.
The ERA found Dr Spacey had raised the issue within the 90-day timeframe, giving him permission to pursue his claim. It also gave him the go-ahead for two of his other grievances – that of failing to provide information about advancement, and using different rules to assess performance – but ruled against the remainder of his claims.
The authority directed the two parties to attend mediation to try to resolve the dispute.
However, there is much you can do to stop bullying, and help your son or daughter to recover.
The first step is to listen to your child, calmly. Hear them out, letting them know they were right to tell you and that, together, you can make the situation better.
Reassure them that they are not to blame. They did not deserve to be bullied. It is not just part of “growing up.” The anti-bullying charity Ditch The Label, advise telling your child that the bully’s “attitude and behaviour is at fault.”
Establishing the facts of what has happened is important, say the Anti-Bullying Alliance. Write down details, and keep a diary of events, to share with the school or college. Such records may prove crucial.
Make sure you involve your child in deciding how the bullying will be dealt with. Discuss any course of action with them first. Victims of bullying already feel powerless, and you need to put your child back in control.
Do not encourage violent retaliation. Hitting back, may place them in greater danger. The ABA cautions that “reacting that way has negative and unpredictable results.” The school could see your child as the bully, punishing them instead.
Finally, speak to your child’s school or college. Again, do this calmly. Storming in and demanding action will not help. Explain what your child has gone through, bringing whatever evidence you have. Ask for a clear idea of how they will tackle the problem and follow-up to ensure it happens. Even if bullying is happening beyond the gates or online, the institution has a responsibility of protection.
A long-running study of British youth reveals that the people who experienced frequent bullying at age 13 had double the risk of developing clinical depression at age 18, compared with people who were never bullied.
It’s impossible to say for sure whether the bullying caused the depression, said study researcher Lucy Bowes, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. But Bowes and her colleagues say they strongly suspect there is a causal relationship. They controlled for factors that might otherwise explain the depression, including baseline depression and emotional problems that might make a person more susceptible to both bullying and to later clinical depression. [10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]
Previous studies have linked bullying with having depression symptoms over the short term, Bowes told Live Science. And a few long-term studies have shown that people who are victims of such aggression during childhood may have long-term mental health problems. For example, a study published in 2013 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found increased risks of depression and anxiety in adulthood among bully victims, and especially among people who had both been bullied and bullied others.
But many of these previous long-term studies were limited because they couldn’t control for pre-existing conditions or because their measurements of bullying lacked detail, Bowes said. In the new study, Bowes and her colleagues used data from the United Kingdom’s Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which surveyed kids at age 13 with specific questions about bullying, including whether they’d experienced physical violence, threats, lies, rumors and exclusion.
“This is an age when the influence of peers becomes paramount,” Bowes said. Then, when the participants reached the other end of adolescence, they answered questions about their symptoms of clinical depression.
Long-lasting scars
About 15 percent of bully victims were depressed at 18 compared with 5 percent of those who hadn’t been bullied — an almost tripling of depression risk, the researchers report today (June 2) in the British Medical Journal. When the researchers controlled for other factors that could influence depression at age 18, such as a teen’s gender and pre-existing emotional problems, the link between bullying and later depression shrank, but remained notable.
Ultimately, “we found that kids who reported that they were frequently bullied at 13 were twice as likely to report being clinically depressed at 18,” Bowes said.
Bowes noted that she and her colleagues also controlled for the effects of being a bully, as people who fill the roles of both victim and bully tend to have pre-existing problems that can obscure the long-term effects of bullying, she said.
The researchers also found that parents and children were often worlds apart in understanding the bullying experience. The survey of more than 3,700 families turned up 1,199 teens who reported they were frequently bullied. But among the mothers surveyed, only 229 said their children were frequent bully victims.
Meanwhile, between 41 percent and 74 percent of teens said they didn’t report bullying to their teachers, and 24 percent to 51 percent said they didn’t tell their parents.
“Bowes and colleagues establish a clear link between victimisation and non-reporting to teachers or family members,” psychological criminologist Maria Ttofi of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an editorial accompanying the paper in the journal. “Parents and teachers need to be aware of this and proactively ask children about school experiences beyond academic matters.”
The study drives home the long-term dangers of bullying and highlights the need to stop it where it starts, Bowes said. Schools are beginning to institute anti-bullying programs, she said, and these should be studied to ensure they’re helping. More programs need to involve moms and dads, too, she said.
“We know that parents’ involvement is really important, and we need to design interventions that are able to bridge the gap between the home and school life,” Bowes said.
Anti-bullying campaigner: Get evidence and report the bully
The boss of an anti-bullying campaign says anyone affected by bullying should get evidence and report it.
Tesse Ojo urged parents to resist the urge to confront bullies, as this could inflame the situation, but instead speak to the target of the bullying to find out how they want it tackled.
She spoke about the case of Matthew Jones, who took his own life after being bullied, and said it is something the Diana Award sees too often.
It’s incredible to think that kids as young as 10 years old are sexting but, according to Northumbria police, it’s happening. How do you stop your child sending or receiving explicit content through a mobile phone?
Northumbria police launched several probes into alleged sex texting last year and reported that one case involved a 10-year-old boy who sent explicit images to an 11-year-old girl. A boy of 12 was also cautioned for sending rude picture messages of himself to a female classmate.
Another youngster, a teenage girl from the same area, was sent x-rated content through mobile picture messaging app Snapchat, reports MailOnline: “I’ve added boys on there who seemed nice when I started chatting to them, but soon enough they were just sending me disgusting picture after disgusting picture,” she said.
You’re probably horrified at the thought of your pre-teen sex texting but here’s the thing: it’s happening. Even if your child isn’t sending explicit messages if they have a mobile phone they’re at risk of receiving them. It’s an issue that needs to be talked about says the NSPCC.
Understand the risks. Sexting, also known as sex texting or cyber sex, can take place between mobile phones but also via tablets and web cams. It’s more common than you probably think: There was a 28 percent increase in calls to ChildLine in 2012/2013 (compared to the previous year) that mentioned “sexting” — the equivalent of nearly one every day.
The majority of teens and pre-teens who indulge in sexting think it’s completely harmless and just a bit of fun, which is why they’re unlikely to talk to their parents about it. Also they don’t want to be judged — or have their phones confiscated.
Sexting is illegal if you’re under 18 because sending an explicit image of a minor is considered to be producing and distributing child abuse images and risks being prosecuted, even if the picture is taken and shared with their permission.
A good time to talk about sexting is when you give your child their first mobile phone. Set out the rules, e.g. no using the phone after a certain time in the evening, not taking it to school, etc. and include a conversation about sexting. Ask your child what sort of messages they think are appropriate to send. Advise them that anything they wouldn’t be comfortable sending to you, or their grandparents, is probably not appropriate.
Explain the dangers of sexting without accusing your child of anything. Tell them that images that are sent to someone else can easily be passed on, shown to other people or published on the internet.
Let them know that they can talk to you about any concerns they have without being judged or punished.
Set up controls on your child’s phone to block access to certain sites or monitor their activity.
If your child has been sending or receiving x-rated messages try to stay calm. Reassure your child that you are on their side and discuss how you can best deal with the situation together.
