CHICAGO, IL—When students at Chicago’s Mikva Challenge released their video on cyberbullying and sexting, called Your Social Life, it made the evening television news. One student in the film, Tiffany Witkowski, a Native American, remembers being bullied when she moved to Chicago after her brother died. “A lot of people would kind of say things about him (and) because we were Native American, they were judgmental towards our lifestyle, " Witkowski said. They took their taunting to Facebook, posting comments on her wall like, “You’re a suck-up. You think you’re better than everybody else.”

"I never felt physically threatened, but I felt emotionally threatened. Why is this happening to me?” Tiffany asks.

The 20-minute video stemmed from a research project that Witkowski and 14 other students at Mikva Challenge, a citywide civic engagement organization for youth, had undertaken the year before, at the invitation of then-Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman. The idea was to brainstorm ways to use technology to improve education.

The students took Huberman’s assignment to heart and came back with a head-turning report and a long list of recommendations, aimed at overhauling the school district’s technology policies to bring them into the 21st century.

The Mikva youth then moved their attention to the darker side of technology: teens “creeping” or stalking one another on Facebook, posting fights and other confrontational material on YouTube, and, in some cases, "sexting." It had been a steady undercurrent in their interviews with peers about how technology could improve teaching and learning. They teamed up with the Chicago-based beyondmedia.org to create Your Social Life.

"My friend was a freshman when she sent her boyfriend inappropriate pictures of herself (topless), and he sent them to everyone in the school," Witkowski said. "I felt so bad for the girl. She was ridiculed so much that she transferred schools. She had suicidal thoughts. Now she's very insecure and she doesn't trust people. I see the way the incident has changed her."

Witkowski said that when she and other youth on Mikva's Education Council began talking about cyberbullying, they realized that each had his or her own experience with it. The Mikva students surveyed about 700 of their peers and found that 33 percent of those polled said they had been cyberbullied—some even dreaded going to school—and about 36 percent of the respondents admitted to engaging in some form of cyberbullying themselves.

The Mikva youth also developed a discussion guide to get kids talking after viewing the video. The message was blunt: Cyberbullying is just as serious as face-to-face bullying and can have lifelong consequences. It must stop.