From Street to Cyber Safety among Inner City High School Students in Philadelphia: Lessons Learned from the BITS Program

itsrg working paper number one 5.29.08

michele masucci

temple university

Media stories over the past year have heightened public awareness regarding cyber safety, teens and the use of information and communication technology (ICT) use. The emphasis of media attention has often been on the victimization and bullying of teens occurring on social network sites such as Myspace and Facebook. The prominence placed on ICT platforms, such as the Internet and Cell Phones, as threatening spheres has resulted in a narrow view of cyber security. Instead, I argue that we need to rethink the meaning of cyber safety for teens and begin a more complex dialog about best cyber safety practices.

Since 2004, The Information, Technology and Society Research Center (ITSRG) at Temple University, Philadelphia, has offered an after school program called Building Information Technology Skills or BITS. The program involves at risk high school students enrolled in the School District of Philadelphia to gain skills in information technology and geographic information science.

The students we serve come mostly from inner-city schools that typify many of the difficult educational and social challenges that garner public attention. Our program provides ICT training as well as access to state-of-the-art computing facilities, otherwise illusive for most of the students with whom we work.

Early on, we discovered that our students are heavily invested as early adopters of new ICTs. And, we learned that most have used a wide variety of strategies to gain access to the best available computer infrastructure and newest devices, whether at home, at Temple University or at their high school.

Given that our focus is on increasing ICT skills among students, our concerns reached into the need to better understand their parallel cyber lives and its impact on their real lives.

We have learned over the course of three years interacting with over three hundred students that most of the BITS students do not differentiate between the affects on their personal computing environment, the sharing of their personal information, and attacks on social network spaces. In the beginning, the BITS students lacked any formal training to gain skills that would allow them to better differentiate between computer environments as a context for improving overall information security. In short, nobody was exposing them to best practices when it came to ICT use.

The lack of any kind of in-depth cyber security training at home or at school is especially concerning because a full 85 percent of the students with whom we work have a Myspace or Facebook account.

While students are able to give voice to some ways to stay safe online, such as not giving out personal information online, eleven percent of the students said they still felt safe providing personal information on web sites and 24 percent felt safe adding a stranger to their Myspace or Facebook account. They are also targets of cyber harassment, with 18 percent of students admitting to being harassed through the Internet and nine percent through cell phones.

The effects of the lack of cyber safety taught in the schools or in their homes became apparent to the BITS staff over the course of program. Students also recognized that this was a growing problem for them. A full 78 percent of students said that cyber safety needs to be taught in high schools. They also said that the adults in their world had little understanding of their cyber worlds or how to advise them in the safe use of ICTs. As a result, only 15 percent of the student reported harassment from either source to adults or parents.

We have also heard from adults in their communities through a series of focus groups and interviews we have conducted in collaboration with the School District of Philadelphia and Nonprofit Technology Resources related to increasing access to computers and student academic records. One concern that emerged from our discussions was that the adults themselves lacked any in-depth understanding of ICTs and how to use them. They also admitted, that it was their children to whom they would turn to for help to improve their understanding of ICTs, including use of the school district’s student records system.

In terms of safety, the primary focus of parents is on street safety not cyber safety. This physical concern is not without basis in reality. Since 2004, 396 young people ages 7 to 24 were killed by gunshots in Philadelphia and an additional 2,380 were injured due to gun violence.

The bITS program confronted the challenge of street or real life violence on a personal level as well. In the beginning, program participants were routinely physically assaulted in route to our program from their high school. As a result, we opted to relocate the program site to Temple University’s Main Campus. Thus, physical access to ICTs was diminished for the inner-city students because of the physical risks they take getting to and from computer labs.

However, what is often missed in the cyber safety debate is that the cyber world offers a unique context for improving student safety.

We expected to find a connection between cyber and street safety when we surveyed the students. However, we had not anticipated the degree to which cyber technologies can offer a refuge and strategic advantage for students to mitigate those circumstances.

Seven percent of our students felt their safety was improved because of the ability to report abuse (anonymously) online. Students recognized the ability to use the Internet to report abuse, access health information, and obtain software to enhance security for home computers. Of particular interest is the use of the Internet by the students to access health information. In our survey, one student commented that the quality of the health information discovered online was better than what had been provided with by the family physician.

Additionally, the students’ parents often felt that the online realm was a much safer place for their children to be than on the streets of Philadelphia. One mother stated that she felt her son being online would mean that he would be less likely to “get into trouble” than he would if he were not using the computer.

What has grown from our conversations with parents and students is that cyber safety has a much broader meaning for the students living in the inner city than is typically attended to in the media. It has led us to rethink the meaning of cyber safety in a much more nuanced way. For the student population that we serve cyber safety encompasses both threats as well as opportunities.

We need to do a better job of learning about the ways students use ICTs as we grapple with the growing presence of cyber worlds. We have learned through the bITS Program that a key part of this is to provide cyber safety education to students that both highlights the challenges as well as the supports for their safety. We encourage a broad societal dialog about creating partnerships between parents, schools, the ICT industry AND students to raise knowledge about how to best ensure that the ICTs students must learn to use to advance their educations and ultimately prepare them to enter the workforce of the 21st century will not diminish their sense of individual, family or community safety.

__________

© Michele Masucci 2008 All Rights Reserved

May be distributed freely under ITSRG Working Paper’s Creative Commons License.