*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on PsychCentral.
According to a new study, 15 percent of sixth-grade students report they have perpetrated at least one form of abuse toward a dating partner through technology.
For the study, researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health analyzed survey results from 424 sixth graders in southeast Texas.
The students, who had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, has just been enrolled in Me & You: Building Healthy Relationships, a classroom- and computer-based curriculum to teach young people the importance of having healthy relationships and how to make good decisions in their relationships with peers, friends, family, and future dating partners.
The survey was taken before the students received the curriculum, the researchers noted.
The most common forms of cyber dating abuse were using a dating partner’s social networking account without permission and making a dating partner afraid of not responding to their partner’s calls or messages, the study discovered.
The students who were more likely to perpetrate cyber dating abuse had participated in bullying before, according to the researchers. The students also believed it was more normal for a boy to perpetrate violence against a girl, researchers found.
“We still don’t know if cyber dating abuse is really a distinct form of dating violence or if it’s just dating violence being perpetrated through a new avenue. The literature has shown that there’s a lot of overlap,” said Melissa Peskin, Ph.D., lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences at University of Texas, Health School of Public Health.
“In this study, we did find that many of the factors associated with cyber dating abuse are also factors associated with traditional forms of dating violence.”
The study was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
Source: PsychCentral
http://psychcentral.com/news/2016/10/15/new-study-finds-15-percent-of-sixth-graders-commit-cyber-abuse/111175.html
Source: Home Word
