Dredze: Predicting and Preventing Youth Violence
When it comes to predicting and preventing
youth violence, there are several approaches we can take. Last week in class,
we talked about computer science and how it has begun to contribute to the
research of youth violence and its prevention. In this essay, I am going to
focus on the approach proposed by Dredze. (Tu/3/4, syllabus) Dredze proposes
that through the study of Cyberbullying we can understand factors that predict
or/and prevent youth violence. First, I am going to briefly explain his theory
in order to outline my understanding of it. Then, I am going to argue that,
although I agree with Dredze’s idea to a certain extent, there are other factors
we can possibly focus on. Finally, I
will argue that Dredze is not very clear when it comes to how this research is
supposed to work and that as a result, questions of violation of privacy, and
the idea of youth-as-subjects-of-saving-and-study and its effect come up as
considerable flaws in his argument.
In his essay, Understanding Factors of Youth Violence Through the Study of
Cyberbullying, Dredze argues that the interactions that teenagers have
through cyberbullying in the social media can provide a “large-scale” data for
the study of the different factors that lead to youth violence (pg.231). Dredze
breaks his essay into seven parts in order to give background to the idea that
we can try to study youth violence through the usage of what he calls “bullying
traces.” These bullying traces would be used as data in order to study bullying
and as a result try to deal with youth violence and prevent it.
The first part of Dredze’s paper has to do
with the relationship between youth and social media. He uses this to make the point that the
majority of youth uses and is affected by social media. The second part of his
paper has to do with the concept of bullying and its relation to cyberbullying
and the effects they both have on youth. He uses this section to make the point
that cyberbullying affects youth just as much as bullying does and that it is
sometimes used as an extension to in-school bullying. He also argues that both
bullying and cyberbullying can cause an increase in social anxiety. The third
part of his essay has to do with the link between bullying and violent
behavior. Here, he makes the argument that bullying and being bullied
correlates with violent behavior and that we, as a society should address
bullying behaviors in order to prevent and reduce violence overall.
In the fourth part, Dredze introduces the
idea of computational methods. He states that: “computer science research for
online bullying has included new user interfaces, social network mechanisms,
intelligent agents, and natural language processing systems for a variety of applications”
(pg. 231). So far, Dredze has introduced the idea that:
youth has an enormous interaction with social media, bullying/cyberbullying is
a serious threat to youth, social media puts youth at a greater risk of
violence, bullying or being bullied has a correlation with violent behavior,
and that computer science research can offer ways in which we can research
cyberbullying/bullying.
After giving this background information,
Dredze continues to the fifth part of his essay, which has to do with detection.
Dredze argues that the first step in dealing with bullying and preventing it is
learning how to detect it. After detecting it, Dredze argues that we can then
learn to prevent and intervene bullying before it happens or has greater
effects. Here he offers a couple of ideas but focuses mainly on bullying
detection systems (computer science).
Finally Dredze introduces the concept of
“bullying traces” which I mentioned in the beginning. Here, he argues that although interviews (with
teachers, students, etc) can help, they do not provide direct observations. He
argues that bullying traces can aid in understanding behaviors and that this
has already worked in other areas of study and research. An example that he
uses is new public health information gathered from large-scale analyses from
Twitter. "Our goal was to find out whether Twitter posts could be
a useful source of public health information, " Dredze said. "We
determined that indeed, they could. In some cases, we probably learned some
things that even the tweeters' doctors were not aware of, like which
over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at
home." (More information about this can be found at the link posted
in the bottom of the essay)
First of all, I want to agree with Dredze’s
idea that social media has an enormous effect on youth and that bullying should
be studied in order to prevent violence. On the other hand, it seems that
Dredze puts little interest on the idea of what happens before bullying, such
as the idea of the foundational causes for bullying. I want to argue that in
order to prevent bullying, not only do we have to study the mechanics[1]
of it but we must also identify the causes of it. My worry is that if we focus
mainly on the research he is offering (focusing only on the act of bullying),
we would be attacking the problem but not from its underlying cause and, as a
result, we will continue having this problem. This counterargument can easily
be dropped since we can continue to look for the underlying cause while we
still try to attack the problem using Dredze's method.
An example of something that reminded me of
this issue is the idea of affirmative action. However, affirmative action is
supposed to help increase the “representation of women and minorities in areas
of employment, education, and culture from which they have been historically
excluded” (Stanford encyclopedia). In my opinion, it
fails to attack the issue from its origins in earlier education and the
discrepancy of the distribution of resources.[2]
As I mention in my thesis, it is unclear to
me how Dredze intends to conduct his research due to the numerous methods of
collecting data. For example, is Dredze referring to surveys, websites, or is
he thinking of accessing what we sometimes consider private information? The idea that worries me the most is the
usage of private information, and who decides on whether researchers have access
to this information or not.
This goes back to the idea of “youth-as-subjects-of–saving–and-study.”
The reason why I make this connection is because, if private information is
being accessed in order to conduct research rather than other methods such as
surveys or intervention websites, then it seems that society does not yet fully
consider youth as being right-holders due to the lack of a right to privacy. Also,
when it comes to who decides if researchers can access this information, the
answer is most likely adults, parents, congressman, etc., therefore, it seems
as though youth would be at risk of losing voice when it comes to deciding
whether or not they have a right to privacy. This can have the risk of Dredze’s
proposition falling into an adult-centered perspective that would fail to put
youth’s perspective in the mix.
Going back to my earlier argument that
Dredze seems to overlook the causes of bullying, it seems as though adults,
such as parents and teachers, might have a lot to do with bullying as well. One
way we might make this argument is that by saying that parents and teachers
have constant interaction (or none) with youth and that this interaction affects
youth’s perception of the world more than we might consider. For example, in
the case of abusive parents, the teen might react by bullying other kids. Also,
we have not considered bullying by teachers, the lack of classroom control, or
why youth younger than eighteen are capable of owning Facebook profiles that
are supposed to be for people eighteen and over. All these factors must be
considered in order to accept Dredze’s proposition that we should use data
gathering to solve the issue of bullying.
All in all, computer science has recently
started to contribute in the research of the prediction and prevention of youth
violence. As a result, people like Dredze offer new approaches using computational
methods to help achieve a reduction in youth violence. Although approaches like this seem very
reasonable at first, it is important to question the possible consequences that
these researches might have if applied.
Resources:
Legal Studies Reader (Pg 231)
[1]
By the “mechanics” of it I mean the way bullying affects, how it works, and how
can we detect it.
[2]
. (Affirmative action is a controversial
issue that I will not go over in detail since its just and example to clarify
the issue I have with Dredze’s approach, feel free to reply to address my
example and question it overall, always looking for new ways of thinking about
stuff)
In her essay, Karen is effective at summarizing and explaining the points that Dredze makes in his article. I find it to be helpful that she mentioned the access of private information because there are many sources that people can use to get information; in fact, there are numerous websites that are not as private as they may seem, or not private until the settings are manually changed. A lot of people put personal information online for others to see, but it is interesting to consider the possibility that this information could be a source of research. Also, I thought the comparison between the legal representations of youth-as-objects-of-saving-and-study and youth-as-rights-holders with technology was made to be rather significant since there is not enough regulation with age requirements online, yet youth are still not believed to be able to make moral decisions using technology (hence the parental controls options that are available). In fact, it is difficult to control what happens on the Internet, which makes it possible for anti-bullying groups like Anonymous to function without being found. I agree with Karen that Dredze’s argument is valid, but not quite perfect and the consequences of this proposal needed to be considered before anything is done to attempt to solve the problem of bullying and cyberbullying.
ReplyDelete-Marlow McCurdy