Bullying beyond the schoolyard: Preventing and responding to cyberbullying

Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2009, 254pp., $39.95,

ISBN: 978-1412966894

With the growth of technology and its emerging role in crime and victimization, the field of criminology has already begun to experience numerous changes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The birth of cybercrime victimization as both a social problem and an interest of academic researchers has led to a plethora of journal articles, books and research reports. In their book Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying , Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin focus on one of the more quickly emerging topics in cybercrime victimization - cyberbullying. As defined by the authors, cyberbullying is 'willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices' (p. 5). As the result of several extreme cases that have occurred since 2005, cyberbullying has become a popular issue that is frequently discussed by the mainstream media. To that end, Hinduja and Patchin's work is one that is both timely and important.

Hinduja and Patchin's book is divided into seven chapters, with a series of reader resources located after Chapter 7. With the first chapter, the authors provide a very basic overview of cyberbullying. The chapter begins with a fictional example of a cyberbullying incident between two teenage girls. They then provide a definition of cyberbullying and explain how they arrived at that definition. They go on to discuss the growing role of technology in the lives of...