Abstract
Many programs exist to prevent bullying and cyberbullying. Nevertheless, despite evidence of the numerous overlapping risks of the Internet, programs that jointly and adequately address large sets of risks are not presently described in the scientific literature. This study’s main objective was to assess the effectiveness of the Safety.net program in a pilot sample. This program prevents eight Internet risks: cyberbullying, sexting, online grooming, cyber dating abuse, problematic Internet use, nomophobia, Internet gaming disorder, and online gambling disorder. The Safety.net program comprises 16 sessions and 4 modules (digital skills, relational risks, dysfunctional risks, and change of attitudes and cognitions). Each session lasts one hour, but the program has a networked instructional design to recall previous content in later sessions. For its assessment, a pre/post-test repeated measures design with a control group and an intervention group was used. The study sample was 165 adolescents between 11 and 14 years old (M = 12.11, SD = 0.89). The intervention group demonstrated improvements compared to the control group concerning online grooming, problematic Internet use, Internet gaming disorder, and nomophobia. These results suggest that the Safety.net program is effective in preventing the increase of most of the assessed risks and that it reduces some of them with a small number of sessions.
Highlights
Heavy and continual use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has provided adolescents with numerous ways to communicate and interact
To evaluate the effects of the Safety.net program, 120 adolescents were assigned to the intervention group, where the Safety.net program was implemented during school hours, and 45 to the control group, where the program was not implemented
No significant differences have been found between the intervention group and the control group, who are similar in terms of age (t = 1.60, p = 0.110) and sex (χ 2 (1, 165) = 1.03, p = 0.369)
Summary
Heavy and continual use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has provided adolescents with numerous ways to communicate and interact. The Internet has many positive aspects for their personal and social development, it has facilitated the emergence and continuity of many problems and online forms of violence affecting adolescents. The most obvious example of such problems in the school context is cyberbullying, which is defined as intentional violent behavior through technologies that repeatedly take place (at any time and in any place) against a victim, who cannot defend him/herself [2]. The average prevalence of this form of online behavior in adolescents and youth is 14.8% [5]. Cyberdating abuse involves using threats, insults, humiliation, and/or denigration within the online context with the intent
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