08/17/2015
15-year-old Mighty Girl Trisha Prabhu wants to put an end to cyberbullying so she decided to investigate an important question: would teens still post hurtful content online if they had to think about how it would affect others first? To answer this question, the young Chicagoan designed ReThink, a software system that encourages adolescents to reconsider if they really want to send an offensive or mean message. Through her research, Trisha has determined that "rethinking" the impact of their messages leads to an incredible 93% reduction in the number of hurtful messages that teens post.
Trisha's interest in figuring out a way to stop cyberbullying was first prompted when she read about the su***de of an 11-year-old Florida girl who killed herself after becoming the target of cyberbullies. Her solution emerged from research on adolescent brain function: in teens, the pre-frontal cortex, which is partially responsible for helping people think before acting, is not yet fully developed. As a result, teens are more likely than adults to act impulsively and post messages without thinking through the consequences. Trisha hypothesized that teens provided with an alert mechanism encouraging them to rethink the potential harm that their message could cause would post fewer hurtful messages.
To test her hypothesis, Trisha designed and ran a study for which she was honored as a global finalist at last year's Google Science Fair. In it, each member of her test group, 150 boys and 150 girls between the ages of 12 and 18, were presented with five different messages based on real-life examples from a cyberbullying research agency. She found that the baseline group was willing to post 67.2% of the hurtful messages they viewed. In the Rethink group, the initial willingness to post was 71%; however, after viewing the prompt encouraging them to reconsider the message, only 4% went ahead with the post.
Since her initial study, Trisha has continued to develop the ReThink system and, last spring, she was invited to demonstrate the program at the 2015 White House Science Fair. An incoming high school sophomore, Trisha is excited by the prospect of her program helping to "stop cyberbullying before it happens, before the damage is done, before the victim feels hurt." She sees ReThink as the perfect fusion of her skills and passion: "I’ve been coding from a very young age. I love using my technology skills. So I thought, OK, I know how to code. I know that this is something I’m passionate about. Let me try and fuse them together to see if I can make a difference. That’s really where ReThink was born.” And, this amazing Mighty Girl hopes that with her program and other bullying prevention efforts, we can "look forward to a future where we have conquered cyber-bullying!”
To learn more about Trisha and ReThink: Effectively Stopping Cyberbullying -- and sign up for the upcoming release of the ReThink: Community Edition, visit http://www.rethinkwords.com/
For an excellent new release for parents on how to teach kids to be kind online, we highly recommend "Kindness Wins: A Simple, No-Nonsense Guide to Teaching Our Kids How To Be Kind Online" at http://www.amightygirl.com/kindness-wins
For a helpful guide about cyberbullying for youth ages 12 and up, check out "lol...OMG!: What Every Student Needs To Know About Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship And Cyberbullying" at http://www.amightygirl.com/lol-omg
There are additional resources for parents on the growing problem of cyberbullying: "Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age" (http://www.amightygirl.com/talking-back-to-facebook) and "The Parent's Guide To Texting, Facebook, And Social Media: Understanding the Benefits and Dangers of Parenting in a Digital World" (http://www.amightygirl.com/parent-s-guide-to-texting).
For a variety of books for children and teens that address bullying of all types, we've shared our favorite books on bullying prevention in two posts. In the first, we showcase books for preschool and early elementary-aged children on teaching empathy and responding to bullying: "The End of Bullying Begins With Me": Bullying Prevention Books for Young Mighty Girls," at http://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=4741
In the second post, we feature recommendations for tweens and tweens, including ones that address cyberbullying: "Taking a Stand Against Bullying: Bullying Prevention Books for Tweens and Teens" at http://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=4804
