News | - Part 11

Schoolyard bullying: are boys meaner than girls? [The Age National, by Amy McNeilage,01/2/2015]

In anecdotal tales of schoolyard bullying, young girls spread rumours and alienate their victims, while boys push and shove.

But new research is challenging these cliches, which experts say are shaped by gender stereotypes rather than evidence.

The preliminary findings of a study conducted in Sydney high schools suggests female students are more likely to engage in social and relational aggression – rumour spreading and manipulation – in the junior years. But, by years 9 and 10, the boys overtake them.

The researcher Katrina Newey, a developmental psychologist and PhD candidate at the University of Western Sydney, also found male students were more commonly the perpetrators of cyberbullying, particularly when it comes to hacking social media accounts or spreading embarrassing videos and photos online.

The research follows the recent publication of a major longitudinal study from the University of Georgia in the US that found boys were more likely to indulge in rumour spreading and social exclusion than girls.

Jennifer Germon, a gender studies academic at The University of Sydney, says there is mounting evidence to debunk the myth that boys use their fists as weapons and girls use words.

“It seems very clear to me that, when boys bully, social exclusion, gossiping and name-calling are crucial to their arsenal,” she says. “It’s really a misnomer to just attribute the language-based forms of bullying to girls.”

Dr Germon says ignoring the nuances of anti-social behaviour means interventions risk overlooking crucial aspects of bullying, particularly among boys.

“Those old arguments just don’t hold,” she says. “They’re counterproductive and they get in the way of effective interventions.”

Helen McGrath, from Deakin University, is a psychologist and leading education academic in the area of bullying.

She says myths around the ways boys and girls bully emerged to fill a research vacuum.

“There was a lack of good research in this area, so people made the assumption that it was more consistent with socialisation for girls to use rumours and social exclusion and for boys to use direct aggression,” she says.

Professor McGrath says while studies suggest there may be some differences, they are not as great as once thought. She says girls might focus more on subtle ways of excluding their peers, while boys have been shown to prefer direct attacks.

The Australian Covert Bullying Prevalence Study published in 2009, for example, found girls were more likely than boys to bully in covert ways, with the behaviour beginning as early as year 3.

Girls were also more likely to have been sent mean messages over the internet, while boys in junior high school were more afraid that they would be physically hurt by bullies.

Bullying: anyone different can be a target [The Telegraph, by Jenny Hulme, 31/1/ 2015]

Katherine Long can’t remember the actual moment when her wonder in her son’s ability and love of learning turned into a worry. Or when she started losing confidence in herself and her parenting, and faced every school meeting trying to hold it together, to stop the tears, when she sat down to discuss “how Josh was doing”.

Josh was seven when he moved from a local primary school, where he had been happy but frustrated, into a carefully chosen school that promised small classes and the chance to thrive, says Katherine, a doctor from Sussex.

“Josh had always been so articulate – he was reading by the age of three, conversing with adults like a child more than twice his age,” she says. “It was like he couldn’t switch his brain off. We could see he was longing to go a bit faster, learn a bit more. But after a year at the new school he seemed unsettled and was talking about boys hurting and taunting him.”

When Katherine shared her concerns with Josh’s teachers, they treated her reports as Josh’s problem rather than the school’s, saying they saw no evidence of bullying in class and calling on her to challenge Josh’s “idiosyncrasies”, suggesting he was triggering problems by “always putting his hand up” or by being “oversensitive” to normal playground banter.

Katherine says each meeting that followed seemed to focus on Josh and how he was coping rather than his classmates and the behaviour he was reporting.

“My husband – who had been taught in a school where bullying was part of a man-up culture – felt Josh needed a little toughening up, and my mother, who had been a head teacher, had often talked about nuisance parents who are always fussing rather than letting a school get on with its job. Her words would ring in my ears whenever I felt inclined to call the school,” says Katherine. “Josh was a happy, bright, confident boy and I just couldn’t believe – or didn’t want to believe – that he was being bullied.”

He was, though, and the abuse continued for more than two years and caused the Long family untold anguish – until a visiting gap-year student saw, and reported, what was happening out of sight of teachers.

This is, it seems, what bullies so often do. Slowly but surely they not only undermine a child’s happiness (and therefore learning) at school, but also – if they go undetected – leave teachers to shine a spotlight on their victim’s behaviour rather than theirs when problems arise. As a result, it’s not only the child’s confidence that is affected but the parents’ too.

The Longs’ case is shockingly typical. Even with all we know about bullying, hundreds of thousands of children are still victims of physical and emotional abuse at school.

The focus during Anti Bullying Week late last year was the staggering number of children with special needs in mainstream schools who suffered at the hands of their peers. But reports around this particular issue can sometimes leave parents feeling the causes of bullying are somehow cut and dried: large classes, or a challenging intake.

When they look more closely at how bullies operate they become aware, as Katherine did, that in any setting where there is an imbalance of power among pupils (and where children’s concerns aren’t heard and acted on) anyone who is different and misunderstood can become a target.

“Josh was small for his age, had red hair and joined halfway through the term. I can see now that there were lots of things that made him vulnerable,” says Katherine. “But it seemed to be his eagerness to do well and contribute a lot that attracted attention. The ones who went for Josh were the boys he called the ‘popular ones’ or the ‘top dogs’ in the class.

“Maybe they felt challenged, or just irritated by his enthusiasm. But they weren’t encouraged to get to know, understand or include him. Josh says now that he felt worthless and ignored, and that it was like we’d been brainwashed into believing it was all his fault. He feels our response – and the teachers’ reaction – was almost harder to deal with than the bullying. He carries that with him still, and so do we.”

Kidscape, the national anti-bullying charity, says that the multifaceted and often manipulative nature of bullying (be it physical abuse or persistent teasing, excluding or humiliation) can be a stumbling block to teachers recognising the problem and delivering a clear anti-bullying policy.

Settings where there is an imbalance of power – the “populars” or “top dogs” described by Katherine would be typical of this – can create a culture where bullying can thrive and where anyone who is different can become vulnerable. In fact, they report frequently seeing bright children such as Josh at their self-help workshops, brought along by parents and carers who, like the Longs, have been made to believe they’re somehow to blame.

“We know this is a side of bullying that doesn’t often get discussed partly because, once families feel vulnerable and start to doubt themselves and each other, they keep the problems hidden away,” says Peter Bradley, Kidscape’s director of services.

“We know it can often bring up a clash of opinions at home. Who knows who is right or wrong? But when emotions are running high, this can cause huge conflict. We meet fathers, for example, who find it incredibly painful to see their child bullied, and feel impotent in the face of the school’s reaction.

“They may, sometimes, put pressure on their kids to react in a certain way. They may want to see them fight back. Their partner may want the opposite. Couples may argue about whether the child should go in to school at all.

“We also know that a child who has been through hell at school can lash out at siblings,” Bradley says. “This is not only frustrating for parents, but can leave them at odds over how to discipline their child – who they know has already had a rough day – or even thinking such behaviour somehow proves the school is right to think their child has problems.

“Bullies effectively disempower the family in the same way they disempower the child. What we try to do is give those families power back by explaining what bullying is, what their rights are, and help them find a path through the destruction. The workshops make a huge difference, but we know there are so many more parents who never seek out help.”

Kidscape has teamed up with four other national charities to help schools understand how differences can trigger bullying, and how by helping children understand difference better, the whole school community can learn more effectively – about themselves, as well as about the subjects of study.

One of the charities, Potential Plus UK, supports children with high learning ability. Its chief executive, Denise Yates, says that schools often don’t understand how being gifted or talented can lead to emotional abuse.

“It’s an issue for children from all social and cultural backgrounds, but I know parents who’ve gone out of their way to find a good school where they believe their child’s talents will flourish and simply don’t expect their child to be bullied. They can be left confused and believing that same good school must be right when they suggest it is them, or their child, that is to blame,” she says.

“If the problem is recognised, there are strategies teachers can introduce to prevent it. If left to carry on, though, we find that children will modify their behaviour and start hiding their ability or messing around to fit in with their peers rather than be bullied by them. Then you have new conflicts between parent and child. It can be soul-destroying.”

“We moved Josh to a different private school when he was 11,” says Katherine Long. “They heard our story and said they could help. I remember the first parents’ evening. I crept in fearing the worst; I’d got so used to teachers talking about Josh as a problem. But it was all positive. It wasn’t about Josh being the perfect student; it was more that they understood him, related to his passion, recognised and embraced his differences.

“In doing that – and doing that for everyone – they promoted more understanding among the pupils. That has continued – Josh is doing his GCSEs now and is loving school. When I think about how they have nurtured him, I am overcome with emotion all over again, but this time for all the right reasons.”

Cyberbully: it’s becoming a bigger problem than ever, so what can be done about online bullying?[The Independent, by Anastasia de Waal, 16/1/2015].

How many calls do you get about the issue of cyberbullying?

BullyingUK saw calls relating to cyberbullying increase by 77% over a 12 month period. Cyberbullying can and does have a seismic effect on the families concerned. In an online survey, BullyingUK also found that 43.5% of respondents aged between 11 and 16 had been bullied via social networks. 51% felt that blocking the bully from further contact or communication was a vital tool.

How big a problem is online bullying?

We believe that some children are being relentlessly bullied with no respite as online social media channels permeate the home and the school environment. But the act of bullying itself is the problem. Whilst recent efforts have focused on the pernicious effects of open and anonymous ‘cyberbullying’; confrontational and physical bullying remains an issue. A national BullyingUK survey (1761 respondents) found:

· 93% of pupils reported that bullying occurred at school primarily during break, in classrooms and the playground

· 81.4% of young people were bullied by more than one person. 62% of the children confided in their parents

· 95% of parent respondents told BullyingUK that bullying took place in school, with 83.2% identified as name calling, 66% as physical bullying and 68.1% social bullying

Has the law changed to deal with the issue?

There is no legal definition of cyberbullying within UK law. However there are a number of existing laws that can be applied to cases of cyberbullying and online harassment, namely the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Malicious Communications Act 1988, Communications Act 2003, Breach of the Peace (Scotland), Defamation Act 2013. Guidelines issued by the Crown Prosecution Service in Dec 2012 explain how cases of cyberbullying will be assessed under the current legislation. Download the ‘CPS Guidelines’ here.The Defamation Act 2013 came into force on 1st January 2014. To read the act and for more information click here.

Should anonymous sites where young people can comment on each other be banned?

For every site that is banned another one will pop up a few days later. Therefore parents, professionals and children need to equip themselves with the resilience to recognize the signs of cyberbullying.

Since early 2013, BullyingUK has been contacted by people express their concern about sites such as Ask.fm which allegedly let any viewer see the names, photographs and details of children as young as 13, then post comments or questions on their profile pages – this has reportedly ranged from insults to perverted sexual advances and threats of violence. This week Ask.fm announced its first safety advisory board to make the site a “safer and more positive place” for users.

That any website enables young and impressionable children and adults to anonymously post damaging and derogatory comments towards young children and adults and needs to be addressed.

What would you advise parents to do?

Technology has become part of the tapestry of family life and plays an increasingly prevalent role in day to day, family activity. However, it is not something that parents – or their children – are at the mercy of – all too often we forget that the online world is a controllable experience.

The same common sense needs to be applied to internet usage as to any other area of parenting. It’s about critical thinking and making smart choices for a healthy balance between digital life and real life. An obvious, but very common, scenario is “my child is glued to their mobile phone from the moment they come home from school to the moment they fall asleep that night”.

First things first: set boundaries early on, particularly around screen time, and instil from the start a rule that devices are left downstairs at bed time. The second thing is to lead by example: the same rules apply for the adults as for the kids. If a parent is continually engrossed on their iPad, or checks work emails during family time, then it makes that behaviour appropriate, and it’s hardly surprising children do the same.

The key is to not wait for conflict, but put boundaries in place to stand you in good stead to deal with issues as and when they arise. Parents have always worried about their children’s use of existing and emerging technologies. We encourage parents to have conversations with their children as the consequences of accessing inappropriate and violent sites can be extremely damaging and can distort perceptions about real life and relationships.

Should children be allowed their own laptap?

We advise keeping PCs, laptops and tablets in a room used by all the family. Parents must monitor how much time their child/ren spend online and encourage them to openly talk about what they’re looking at. Young people are more likely to seek help and advice from parents who listen and are supportive, rather than those who lecture or fly off the handle.

Parents should be talking to their children at a young age and stressing the importance of a password, and how they should NEVER share their passwords out with friends or strangers. Parents should create their children’s online accounts themselves and not let the child do it. That way they will also have access to passwords. Of course parents can’t monitor other occasions where their child may set up an account hence why the importance of not sharing passwords must be re-iterated.

If you have purchased your child a laptop make sure you set the laptop up with you as the ‘Administrator’ and create your child’s account without these rights. This is a safety precaution as it also prevents your child from installing in malware or by mistake clicking on something they should not have which could then install malicious software onto their laptop. It is through software like this that criminals are able to take control of web cams on machines.

Microsoft also has very easy to use ‘Parental Controls. Windows 8 for example lets you create an account as a ‘child’s account’ and then the wizard walks you through step by step the various parental control options. When your child begins to use their laptop logged in with their ‘child’ account they get a little pop saying their account is being monitored via parental controls. You as the parent will receive a weekly report emailed to you on what your child has been doing. Some of the report covers items such as the number of hours they have used certain applications, the most used ‘search terms’ typed in and any potentially unsafe sites visited.

What about their phone?

Mobile phones and tablets come with very useful ‘Restrictions’ area on their operating system. You as the parent can enable this via a 4 digit pin. Your child then cannot access this section without your pin. You can access this area in setting/restrictions and manage your child’s access to the internet browser and the app store. You can switch off ‘in app purchases’ and even select the age level of apps and movies and music they can access. You can also prevent face-time from being used. This is a very useful area to set up and only takes minutes.

What should schools do?

Whilst not being limitless in their capacity of course, schools need to be alive to the reality that bullying today goes well beyond the boundaries of the playground. Just as with any form of bullying schools should be alert to the signs and work to foster collaboration between teachers, parents and pupils in tackling the issue. For more information visit here.

What advice would you give to young people about their online identity?

Just as we teach children how to cross the road and how to swim, online activity and social media interaction should be initially supervised. Adults may feel they are behind the technological curve, but parents and other family members may wish to familiarise themselves with how the ever evolving computer and mobile technology works. For example, spending time with children looking at functions, exploring how to block unwanted emails and the GPS facility.

If a child seems distressed after a phone call or time spent on the internet, try and find out the reasons for this. Vulnerable children can become so consumed by negative online comments towards them, it is crucial that a sense of perspective and proportion is injected by a role model to avoid issues spiralling out of control.

Anastasia de Waal is Chair of BullyingUK

Ladies and trolls: Should we make cyberbullying a crime? – Ireland. [The Register, by Jennifer Burke, 5/1/2015 ].

Ireland’s top legal watchdog is asking for public opinion on whether a new crime of cyber-bullying should be introduced. Members of the public have another two weeks to respond to the independent Law Reform Commission’s (LRC) public consultation on cyberbullying, privacy and reputation.

The Commission’s job is to advise the government on legislation and plans to issue recommendations for criminal law and civil remedies including “take-down” orders.

The consultation asks whether people believe the harassment offence in section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 should be amended to incorporate a specific reference to cyber-harassment.

Specifically, it wants to know if “interfering with another person’s privacy” through “cyber technology” should be a criminal offence. The consultation document points out that “the breach of privacy would have to be more serious than just causing embarrassment to the victim. There would have to be significant humiliation involved not matched by a public interest in having the information published.”

It seems that the leak of celebrity selfies last year was one of the motivations for the consultation as the document mentions J-Law and other “well-known personalities” whose images were distributed online after their iCloud service was hacked. Computer hacking is already an offence in Ireland under the Criminal Damage Act 1991.

However the legal boffins are still worried that current law on hate crime, harassment, etc does not adequately address activity that uses cyber technology and social media, such as so-called “revenge porn” and “fraping” (amending a person’s Facebook profile or other social media profile).

According to the LRC, individuals online “may feel disconnected from their behaviour” as it occurs at a distance from the victim. “This sense of disconnection is increased by the anonymity frequently involved in online communications and may prompt individuals to act in a manner they would not in the offline world,” it says.

Harassment laws include the element of repetition or persistence of an offence, but the searchability of the web means that damaging content can survive long after the event and can be used to re-victimise the target each time it is accessed. For this reason it is difficult to determine if some forms of cyber stalking fall under current laws.

Setting up harmful websites or fake profile pages on social networking sites, in order to impersonate the victim and post harmful or private content in the victim’s name is another area the consultation asks respondents to consider.

Submissions are required before 19 January 2015.

This Is What It Really Feels Like to Be Bullied [Huffington Post, by Anna Koppelman, 17/12/2015 ].

I couldn’t fall asleep last night. As I lay there staring at the celling, I tried to piece together what must be wrong with me. I’m a total loser with no friends. I am not invited to any parties, and the only person who likes to hang out with me during free time is the school nurse. I kept wondering how I was going to force myself to go to school the next day. How was I going to walk in the door? I kept wondering, how I was going to face the pain for another day?

I have been bullied since the first day of kindergarten. I can dissect everything a dirty look has to say within seconds. I have perfected the feeling of being isolated, and I am an Olympic athlete when it comes to eating lunch alone. My room is covered with inspirational quotes: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “If they don’t like you for being yourself, be yourself even more.” I’m constantly being told that it will all get better. That if I can get though the hard part, if I can hug the monster, one day all of this will be in the distant past, and the kids who torture me now will just be a mere blimp in my oblivion. I have been trying since the first day of kindergarten when the mean girl took a permanent maker to the picture of a flower I spent all day working on to convince myself that the future will be better, but I am tired of coming home crying. I am tired of eating lunch alone in the ink section of the Staples two blocks away from my school. I am tired of being the victim of “catty girls” and “stupid boys.” I am tired of waiting for some future that seems farther and farther away each morning I have to convince myself to go to school. I am tired of playing the friend game. I am tired of being punished for being myself.

When I was in fourth grade, Lindsay* dumped a mixture of Oreos and dirt right onto my head. I didn’t even flinch. Instead I smiled and twirled. My grandmother once told me that if you smiled at someone they couldn’t help but smile back. So that’s what I did. I looked Lindsay right in the eyes and hoped that she would smile back. She didn’t. Instead she laughed. She laughed at the freak that smiled and twirled after cookies and dirt were thrown on her head. When people talk about bullying they never seem to grasp the kind of pain I feel every day walking into school. It’s the kind of pain that’s hollow. The kind that makes you feel like shattering glass. The kind of pain that makes your heart physically hurt. I have lost all my ability to walk though hallways smiling, with my head up high. I forgot how to wave at people I don’t know. When I walk though the halls, I look at my phone. I scroll though Facebook, I text my parents, I watch TED talks. I get to class; I sit down, look at my watch. I tell myself that there are only X amount of hours left in the day and that I’ll be safe soon, curled up in bed with Netflix and tea.

Tomorrow morning I will wake up and play “Shake it Off” really loudly, then I’ll proceed to tell myself all the anecdotes I have spent hours studying of celebrities who survived bullying. Finally, I will drag myself out of bed, force myself to wash my face, put makeup on, wear decent clothes, brush my hair and eat breakfast. I’ll tell myself again and again that it will be okay until I am out the door and biting my nails on the walk to school. I don’t want it to be like this. I want school to be a safe place. I want to be able to walk though hallways with my head held high. I want to be treated like I am somebody worth something, I want to have friends and people waiting for me at lunch, but more than anything, I want to wake up one morning truly happy without a worry of what will happen next. I want to be able to walk out the door ready, and excited for a new day. I want to wake up one morning and not have to reassure myself that everything will be okay. I don’t understand why I am not allowed to have that.

Protect your cyber teen this Christmas. [Irish Independent, by Deirdre Reynolds, 28/12/2014].

From neknominations to ice-bucket challenges, 2014 was undoubtedly the year of the cyber teen.

And as teens and preteens throughout the land rapidly run down the battery on their brand new tablet or smartphone this festive season, it’s only a matter of time before the next viral craze sweeps the nation in 2015.

A staggering 48pc of kids aged six to 12 implored Santa to bring them an Apple iPod this Christmas, according to a recent Nielsen survey. And 60pc of 13 to 19-year-olds were also hoping to find some kind of tablet under the tree on Thursday morning.

But while thousands of students here spend the rest of the holidays glued to internet-enabled gadgets, many of their parents will enter the New Year feeling more disconnected from their children than ever, experts warn.

“A lot of children will have received their first tablet or smartphone on Christmas morning,” says social media expert Aoife Rigney. “It can be quite scary for parents.

“For those who have younger kids, it’s easier to say: ‘Don’t do X, Y or Z online.’ For parents of teenagers, it can be more daunting – especially if they’re not IT literate themselves.”

With new research this year showing that the average Irish seven-year-old now has a smartphone, with their older teenage siblings typically checking social media 125 times a day, it’s little wonder Irish parents are still worried about the dangers that lurk online.

In September, Ireland’s first ever national cyberbullying conference, Understanding and Managing Cyberbullying, took place in Dublin Castle after a survey by the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals found that 16pc of Irish students have experienced bullying online – a 33pc increase on 2013. While in February, Taoiseach Enda Kenny urged teenagers not to accept neknominations after the extreme drinking game – which went viral on Facebook and Twitter – was linked to the death of 19-year-old Jonny Byrne from Carlow, telling Galway Bay FM: “This is not a game and young people irrespective of their connection with social media should just give this up.”

Avril Ronan, head of internet safety at Trend Micro, told Weekend Review in April: “You wouldn’t give a child the keys to your car, so why would you let them do anything they want online. When it comes to teenagers, parents don’t have to understand every aspect of the technology because there’s no way they can try to keep up with every trend.

“What parents can do is teach their children about issues such as bullying, good behaviour and etiquette online. The principles are the same, even though the apps may change.”

One survey by parenting site Mumsnet nonetheless found that 30pc of parents allow their children unsupervised access to the internet.

“When it comes to the internet and what teenagers are exposed to, most parents really don’t get it,” says Dublin psychotherapist Joanna Fortune. “It’s not enough to say you don’t understand that stuff and you’re not into it.

“You have to adjust your parenting style in line with their development. At the same time, parents can’t be their cool friend who allows them to do everything.”

For parents who gifted their child a gadget two days ago, it’s not too late to set the ground rules, explains Aoife Rigney.

“Every Christmas, I get worried tweets from parents asking things like: ‘How do I turn off the wifi?’,” she says. “In this day and age, many kids know more about technology than their parents, so it’s important for mums and dads to catch up. Technology is not necessarily a bad thing for young people. For instance, there are loads of apps and games that are great for learning. What’s important is parents get involved in the conversation from the outset.

“Casually reminding teenagers not to give out personal information, checking in online when they’re walking home, is likely to be more effective than lecturing them about the dangers of the internet.

“For younger kids, setting out the limits from the beginning, like that they can use their tablet for an hour in the evenings after they’ve done their homework, and maybe giving them more freedom as they get older, is key.”

Certainly technology and the internet hasn’t harmed Cork teenagers Ciara Judge, Emer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow.

The Kinsale Community School students bagged the top prize at the Google Science Fair 2014 in California in September for their ground-breaking project on seed germination which could help tackle world hunger.

“There’s no point in telling parents not to buy the devices because they’re only going to be even bigger next Christmas,” says Rigney.

“It’s a bit like crossing the road, kids know from a young age that there are cars on the road – it’s up to the parents to help them cross safely.”

Ask.fm may base itself in Ireland, but social-media abuse isn’t about geography. [ IrishTimes, by Brian Boyd, 8/11/2014].

Would you, at any stage today, go into a shop, bar or restaurant, approach someone you didn’t know and call them “a fat, ugly slut”? Or say you hope they “die of cancer”, before casually moving on? It happens on ask.fm.

The ask.fm site is most popular among 13- to 18-year-olds; anti-bullying charities have called for it to be boycotted. Parents have been urged to warn their children off using it.

Ask.fm announced this week that it is moving its headquarters to Dublin, from its current site in Latvia. Taoiseach Enda Kenny said on Tuesday that there had been “real concerns and anxiety” about the site, adding that the Department of Children and Youth Affairs can work with the site on the issue of cyberbullying.

Ask.fm’s chief executive, Doug Leeds, speaking about the move to Dublin, said the company had hired the world’s best safety experts to ensure a safe and bully-free environment for users. “The overwhelming majority of people who use the site are using it for entertainment, for conversation.”

With about 175 million users worldwide, ask.fm is seen a parent-free digital space where many young teens get their first experience of social media. Primarily, it allows users to ask and answer questions from other members on the site. Some of the users are anonymous.

The site is generally benign, but a small percentage use it for a form of hate-speak.

Simple to use, ask.fm can be a lively and engaging forum for teenagers to share their views on school, music and TV. But for some it is a magnified version of the school playground, where gangs form, individuals are picked on, and anonymous users post content that even in its most printable form runs to “drink bleach”, “go get cancer”, “go die”. A thirteen-year-old in the UK has been threatened with rape.

The founder of ask.fm, Mark Terebin, has said that in his experience cyberbullying is worst in Ireland and the UK. “It seems children are more cruel in these countries.”

It’s certainly not exclusive to ask.fm. This sort of activity happens on several social-networking sites, but ask.fm does seem to have become a particular source of worry.

Two young girls from Co Donegal, aged 15 and 13, took their own lives in 2012 after being subjected to abuse on the site. Some saw a connection between the posts and the girls’ deaths.

Prominent UK companies – including Vodafone, Specsavers and Laura Ashley – said last year they would not advertise on ask.fm for ethical reasons, following cases there. The British prime minister, David Cameron, said people should boycott “vile” websites that allow cyberbullying.

Although Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan says that “ask.fm relocating to Dublin is a matter of concern”, and that it is an issue he will be raising with his colleagues, the reality is that it matters little where the site has its headquarters. Equally, the site could be banned tomorrow to little or no effect. The conversation would merely move elsewhere.

With due regard for the grief, anger and sadness of parents whose children have lost their lives, a panic about ask.fm in isolation does not address the bigger issue.

Bullying behaviour, by both teens and adults, is endemic to social-media dialogue. And the worst bullying comes from those afforded anonymity.

On the more grown-up Twitter and Facebook sites, bullying and personally hateful remarks can be contextualised by adults who are generally more inured to their effects. But when your core audience is to 13- to 18-year-olds, it’s different. A 13-year-old today sees content online that would send shivers down the spine of the most robust and broad-minded adult.

Following the death of the 13-year-old Donegal girl Erin Gallagher, in 2012, the founder of ask.fm, Mark Terebin, said that the site could not be held responsible for cyberbullying and that it is “necessary to go deeper and to find the root of the problem. It’s not about ask.fm. The problem is about education and moral values that have been devalued. Start with yourself; be more polite, kinder and more tolerant of others. Cultivate these values in families and in schools.”

Whatever your feelings about ask.fm, Terebin’s point is at least partly true: in the online world, legislating against bullying behaviour is almost impossible – but educating about its causes, context and consequences is not.

Call for watchdog to tackle bullying online [Examiner, by Sarah Slater, 10/11/2014].

Jim Harding, founder of the anti-bullying group Bully4U, also called for more powers to independently audit social media organisations such as Ask.fm, Facebook and Twitter.

Bully4U provides training to children and teachers at primary and secondary school on the dangers of cyberbullying. It warns that a huge number of schoolchildren they deal with say many social media comments are of “an extreme sexual nature”.

Mr Harding has made the call for Government to introduce “badly needed” statutory powers following the announcement that Ask.fm, which allows users to post anonymous questions to others, is to relocate to Ireland.

Bully4U deals with thousands of schoolchildren every year and, in conjunction with the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre at Dublin City University, held the first national cyberbullying conference in September.

“There really needs to be more substantial powers to independently audit such websites as Ask.fm. People can just post comments anonymously, so there needs to be some sort of trail so that posts can be verified. Such posts include; ‘Go die, you are worthless,’” Mr Harding said.

“Having Ask.fm located in Dublin makes no difference when it comes to the use of social media as it has no worldwide borders. Hopefully one good thing of having the social media website located here is that it will push for the creation of a social media ombudsman, allowing these companies to be independently audited and for the introduction of fines if certain guidelines are not followed by these companies.

“Up to 30% of children we deal with feel that Twitter is the safest of the social media networks in use. Urgent measures to stop the creation of false social media accounts set up by children who are under the age of 13, need to be in place. Parents feel they have no influence in their children’s internet usage.”

Ask.fm in a statement said it plans to introduce a “law enforcement affairs officer” based in Ireland.

Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has also voiced concern on Ask.fm moving to Ireland and intends to raise the issue with the Government.

Ask.fm has come under scrutiny following the deaths by suicide of 15-year-old Ciara Pugsley in Leitrim and 13-year-old Erin Gallagher in Donegal in 2012. Erin’s older sister Shannon took her life soon afterwards. Their mother Lorraine has campaigned to have the site shut down.

Jonathan Pugsley, whose daughter Ciara took her life following alleged cyberbullying and who has condemned the relocating of Ask.fm to Ireland, said it “is worrying that the popularity of the site was increasing again”.

Ask.fm chief executive Doug Leeds said: “I can tell you that there are 180m global unique users that visit Ask.fm each month. Ireland is still a relatively small market for us, but we’ve seen 30% growth for registered users in Ireland in the last year.

“In terms of daily new registered users on a global scale, there were 400,000 new users in one day (earlier this year) caused by a spike in registrations in Thailand in April. In the last three months, the average number of daily registrations is between 120,000 and 140,000.”

Sexting is normal for children: study [SBS.COM.AU, by AAP, 15/10/2014 ].

Children now see “sexting” as part of normal life with girls more likely to provide sexually explicit pictures of themselves through social media Smartphone apps, according to an anti-bullying report.

Instances of abuse and sexting, where explicit texts and pictures are sent between smartphone devices, are on the rise and are having a serious detrimental effect on the health and wellbeing of young people, English charity Ditch the Label has claimed.

The British anti-bullying organisation surveyed 2732 people aged between 13 and 25 and had published the findings in its Wireless Report.

The survey revealed that 62 per cent of young people had been abused through a Smartphone app, while 37 per cent had sent a naked photo of themselves and 24 per cent had seen that image shared without their consent.

Girls were twice as likely to send a naked photo to someone than boys, the report said.

While 49 per cent of those questioned said they believed sexting was just a bit of harmless fun and 16 per cent said it was “the normal thing to do”, 13 per cent of young people claimed they had felt pressurised into sending explicit pictures.

Chloe, 17, who did not want to give her surname for fear of reprisals, said she fell into a deep depression after sending a naked photo of herself to a boy she trusted, only to find he had uploaded it to Facebook.

The teenager was being bullied at school three years ago and thought that by becoming friends with the boy the bullying would stop.

She claims he spent three or four months asking for her to send him a naked “selfie” and that she eventually relented under the pressure.

The next day she saw the picture had been uploaded to Facebook and many pupils at her school had seen it.

“He said it served me right. It had a lot of repercussions for me and I fell into a severe depression.

“I tried to commit suicide a few times. It was really tough.

“I didn’t let my dad know because it would have broken his heart. My mum was angry with me but there was nothing she could do but support me.”

Chloe said she contacted Facebook but it took at least two days for the image to come down, by which time the damage had already been done.

The Facebook website says it does not tolerate bullying or harassment and that it has “a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved”.

It claims it also imposes limitations on the display of nudity.

Ditch the Label also looked at the most popular apps used by young people on Smartphones.

Snapchat – an instant photo sharing platform with images being “deleted” after 10 seconds, came top, followed by Instagram, Skype, Kik Messenger – a free anonymous instant messaging app, and Whatsapp, according to the charity.

The survey also revealed that 62 per cent of young people had been sent nasty private messages through Smartphone apps and that 52 per cent had never reported the abuse they received.

A further 26 per cent said they felt like their complaint was not taken seriously when they reported it, the survey said.

Almost half of those who had suffered abuse through a Smartphone app said they had experienced a loss of confidence, while 22 per cent turned to self-harming as a coping mechanism and 22 per cent tried to change their appearance to avoid further abuse.

Claire Lilley, head of Child Online Safety at the NSPCC said: “Sadly many children now see sexting as part of normal life with girls constantly being pestered to provide sexual pictures of themselves.

“It may seem harmless fun but it can often have a devastating end with images that were never intended to be shared being circulated to a massive audience.”

Bullying, Cyber Bullying & Digital Safety Workshops For Primary & Secondary Schools

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