This book was originally contracted to be the second edition of my earlier book with Cambridge University Press, Confronting Cyberbullying: What Schools Need to Know to Control Misconduct and Avoid Legal Consequences, published in 2009. It was certainly time for an update, given the continued media and public policy focus on cyberbullying. However, try as I might, I could not update the book because even though some of the issues remain the same, the modes of expression and digital media used to carry them out have evolved rapidly. That is not to say that the legal and educational dilemmas and challenges I addressed in Confronting Cyberbullying are not important, or that they have all been successfully resolved. In fact, the reactive responses I argued against in earlier publications continue, emerging as harsher and often misapplied laws to criminalize children’s online behavior. This is a disturbing trend because in adopting reactive responses, we overlook young people’s motivations and moral development, or the adult modeling and societal influences that bring out such behavior.

The face of what we broadly refer to as “cyberbullying” has also taken on a more sexually charged and insidious nature. Many news media reports and policy initiatives appear to confuse the actions of pedophiles and online child sexual predators with cyberbullying. Child pornography laws in the United States and Canada are being applied to arrest, charge, and jail adolescents who engage in sexting. However, as the research disclosed in this book illustrates, these kinds of behaviors demonstrated by adolescents are not the same thing as “child pornography.” Although some forms of sexting among youth are seriously demeaning and offensive, and need to be prevented, my research finds that most young people are testing social boundaries online as their hormones rage and they attempt to establish social relationships.