Professor Ruth Aylett, Professor of Computing Science at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University believes that with young people increasingly familiar with computer games and story-telling through virtual reality worlds, the opportunity to interact with characters who are ‘virtually’ facing the same sort of problems that the pupils might be suffering in their everyday lives could be immensely beneficial.

“If you’re a young person facing some sort of bullying on a regular basis the problem can seem too big, too overwhelming, to tackle. What we will be developing is a virtual world where the user can interface directly with a synthetic character who is also a bullying victim. That bullying scenario is played out on the screen then the user can interface with the synthetic character, discuss what has happened and make choices about how the character might like to react in future. They can then watch the next scenario and see what sort of impact that advice has in how things turn out. That way, instead of what feels like a huge problem in their own lives the decisions are broken down into bite-sized chunks affecting a virtual character.“

Any attempt to tackle bullying is clearly a good thing, and the initial results have been promising: “children like the interaction with the virtual characters and find the content highly interesting and believable”. The main usability issue has apparently been the quality of the graphics. It’s an interesting approach, though bullies themselves appear to be keeping abreast of the latest technology. On March 31, a four-year study was presented to the British Psychological Society, which revealed that nearly 15% of 11,227 children had been victims of cyber-bullying.

There are reasons to believe at least some of this reduction is due to youth being more cautious about interacting with people they do not know offline. A smaller proportion of youth overall were communicating online with people they did not know in person (page 7)

Key Statistics:

Solicitation
2000: 19%
2005: 13%

Exposure to pornography
2000: 25%
2005: 34%

Harassment
2000: 6%
2005: 9%

Source: Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire; margin of error ± 2–3 percentage points

While agreeing that the figures on sexual solicitation represented an improvement, Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, told USA Today said the numbers are “still way too high.” The report shows that the number of aggressive solicitations remains the same over the period. Also, since more children were online in 2005 versus 2000, the actual number of solicitations may well have remained the same.

A number of commentators have pointed to the figures as exonerating social networks such as MySpace, which have become the subject of a moral panic recently. Internet researcher Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says the new research reinforces what he has seen in his own research: “There simply is not the volume of predators on MySpace that people imagine.”