Ms Alex Cooney:

I regularly talk to teachers and principals and they are definitely seeing the fallout in the classroom, with children coming in tired or falling out over cyberbullying incidents or gaming. There is a clear dynamic. I spoke to a principal yesterday in preparation for anti-bullying week next week and he said that in the ten years he has been a principal the change has been stark. Obviously, in the early years as a principal he was dealing with bullying but the amount of online instances he now has to deal with is just incredible. That has an impact on the schools each day. As our survey showed, teachers are dealing with this in the classroom all the time. Anecdotally, therefore, there is good evidence.

A survey published in the UK this year found that girls who were using social media at ten years of age for an hour a day are far more likely to have social and emotional problems at 15 years of age. That was a five year longitudinal study, so some evidence is starting to emerge. The children we are talking to are all in primary school and they largely value popularity over privacy. They do not really understand the ramifications of sharing all sorts of things such as dick pictures, intimate images and children being told to kill themselves because of the colour of their skin or because of the way they look. There is a great deal of harmful communication and the online-offline balance - how one treats people in real life versus how one treats them online - is not well understood. That is why we keep returning to the education piece.