Cyberbullying is a growing problem affecting more than half of all American teens. The main goal of this paper is to investigate fundamentally new approaches to understand and automatically detect and predict incidents of cyberbullying in Instagram, a media-based mobile social network. In this work, we have collected a sample data set consisting of Instagram images and their associated comments. We then designed a labeling study and employed human contributors at the crowd-sourced CrowdFlower website to label these media sessions for cyberbullying. A detailed analysis of the labeled data is then presented, including a study of relationships between cyberbullying and a host of features such as cyberaggression, profanity, social graph features, temporal commenting behavior, linguistic content, and image content. Using the labeled data, we further design and evaluate the performance of classifiers to automatically detect and predict incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression.

Research consistently finds that a comprehensive approach to school safety, which integrates the best scientific evidence and solid implementation strategies, offers the greatest potential for preventing youth violence and promoting mental and behavioral health. However, schools and communities encounter enormous challenges in articulating, synthesizing, and implementing all the complex aspects of a comprehensive approach to school safety. This paper aims to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and the application of that evidence in schools and communities by defining the key components of a comprehensive approach to school safety and describing how schools can assess their readiness to implement a comprehensive approach. We use readiness and implementation data from the Safe Communities Safe Schools project to illustrate these challenges and solutions. Our findings suggest that (1) readiness assessment can be combined with feasibility meetings to inform school selection for implementation of a comprehensive approach to school safety and (2) intentionally addressing readiness barriers as part of a comprehensive approach may lead to improvements in readiness (motivation and capacity) to effectively implement a comprehensive approach to school safety.

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Firearm homicide and suicide are the leading causes of violence-related injury deaths among U.S. youth. However, evaluations of the effectiveness of firearm violence prevention programs and strategies to reducing youth firearm violence are limited. To help inform and evaluate such efforts, this study aimed to identify risk and protective factors associated with youth firearm access, possession or carrying (for reasons other than hunting or target shooting) among a sample of U.S. urban youth in the Mountain West. Findings show the influence that youth violence risk (e.g., having friends engaged in delinquency; violence; drug sales; gang fights; exposure to violence; screening positive for violence risk) can have on youth firearm access, possession or carrying. Implications for prevention and intervention are discussed.

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