Shaheen Shariff: Sexting and Cyberbulling: Defining the Line for Digitally Empowered Kids

Shaheen Shariff’s Sexting and Cyberbullying: Defining the Line for Digitally Empowered Kids presents an ambitious and thorough attempt to illuminate the various ethical, social, and legal considerations that surround cyberbullying. As her recurring dislike of the term ‘‘cyberbullying’’ reveals, this concept admits much nuance, and a good deal of the book serves accordingly as an effort to minimize the generational gap in understanding between the children who expertly engage in using various digital media and the adults who attempt to monitor, regulate, and understand these children’s actions. Ultimately, her arguments culminate in a body of evidence-based policy recommendations and educational tools that signal her hopes that the issues of sexting and cyberbullying can be dealt with effectively through a preventative, rather than reactive, approach. The book may have originally been intended for lawyers, parents, lawmakers, and educators, but ultimately it achieves a high level of accessibility that makes it more than suitable for reading by post-secondary (and even mature secondary) students. Shariff does not deny the presence of gaps in her research, but she acknowledges that her team continues to fill these through ongoing investigation. She also stresses that once her current research has been completed (in 2016), she will undoubtedly have a very different version of this book to present. Thus, in its current, slightly incomplete state, Shariff’s book manages nonetheless to present comprehensive and thoughtful views on cyberbullying in its context among DE (digitally empowered) kids, and in raising many intriguing questions it serves as an effective introduction to thinking through the many complexities of digitally empowered generations. The first chapter serves as the book’s introduction and begins by exploring previous research into the nature of cyberbullying. She mentions work from the past decade that she suggests would supplement her current work (Shariff 2009; Van Praagh 2007). Shariff then carefully explains the delicate nature of several kinds of interactions on the internet, and also provides solid definitions of ‘‘trolls’’ and ‘‘cappers’’ to give the audience an idea of what sort of adults get involved in explicitly illegal cyberbullying of children. She also spends a good deal of time thinking through and defining the notions of DE Kids, DE Young Adults, and DE Generations. This ensures that the audience has enough familiarity with the varying flavors of digital empowerment to understand the arguments that she will make. Furthermore, in revealing her thought processes as she attempted to best define DE kids, she reveals the many considerations that go into trying to think about youth from an objective and empirical lens. Shariff then poses a list of questions directly applicable to the legal framework regarding cyberbullying and children, and delays her answers to later chapters to give the audience time to consider them independently. She then proceeds to give a thorough overview of the goals, structure, and content of the chapters that follow. Although this leaves little to the imagination when one actually reads the later chapters, it does nonetheless allow the audience to have a clear picture of her entire argument before they begin to read any one part of it. This also gives her ideas a nice formal cohesion because she describes how they are interrelated from the very beginning. Additionally, the overview she gives of the various legal and statutory examples that she cites later enables the audience to attain a degree of comfort with these examples, which proves & Jordan Lenchitz joilench@indiana.edu