Do people ever consider the possibility that, if they're exposed to increased reports about a social problem, it's the reporting that has increased rather than the problem? It's increasingly clear that this is the case with school bullying :Only news reports about it have increased, not the behavior itself. In fact, both bullying and fear of it are down among US middle school students The rate of students who reported fearing an attack or harm at school at all has dropped dramatically, from nearly 12% in 1995 to less than 4% in 2011. For black and Hispanic students, it's an even more encouraging shift--from more than 20% of both groups of students worried about being attacked at school to less than 5% in 2011. The decline in actual physical violence in schools is even more dramatic: It was down 74% between 1992 and 2010, according to the latest US Department of Justice data. What about cyberbullying? Online _ increased from 6% in 2000 to 9% in 2005 to 11% in 2010 between, and it's interesting to note that it increased less between 2005 and '10 than in the first 5 years tracked. Because social media is very much a reflection of school social life for young people, the peer aggression seen in social media is a lot like the peer aggression seen on school bathroom walls. So once it finds its "dead level," it will probably decline in the same way verbal and written aggression have. Besides education and crime prevention at the social level, medicine treatment and better access to mental healthcare also contribute to this downward trend in victimization of self and others. The rise of social media is what people don't typically think of as a positive force in society. But Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire says, "These technologies might have prevented crime and bullying by providing more ways of help, more forms of social supervision, and interesting activities that destroy forms of alienation  that lead to crime". Finkelhor believes that social media have a   _   influence on the falling trend of school bullying.
positive negative major slight