CHILDREN are being targeted ‘around the clock’ by cyberbullies, it has emerged in the aftermath of the death of a 15-year-natasha macbrydeold Midland schoolgirl.
Natasha MacBryde. Picture by Newsteam International
CHILDREN are being targeted ‘around the clock’ by cyberbullies, it has emerged in the aftermath of the death of a 15-year-old Midland schoolgirl.
Natasha MacBryde, a year ten pupil at a private school, was killed by a train amid claims that bullies were to blame for her death.
National charity ChildLine spoke out saying cyberbullying is set to increase as young people find it easier to torment their victims by text and mobile phone at all hours with ‘no escape’.
Schoolgirl Natasha, described as a ‘charming, lovely and model pupil’, was struck near Bromsgrove railway station in the early hours of Monday morning. She lived in Warmstry Road, which is just a few steps away from the rail line.
Friends have claimed bullying is responsible for her death in tributes on social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.
Her distraught dad Andrew, aged 47, who is separated from Natasha’s mother Catherine, aged 43, said he wasn’t shocked by the bullying allegations.
He said: ‘I have no idea why Natasha died. But I am not surprised there are messages on Facebook saying she was bullied. I have no idea what happened, that is what the British Transport Police want to find out.”
Natasha was a pupil at Royal Grammar School, Worcester.
ChildLine supervisor John Anderton, who is based in Birmingham, said that cyberbullying, in which children attack others by text, mobile phone, instant messaging or social networks, is on the rise.
The helpline receives more than 20,000 calls from young people about bullying each year.
“With cyberbullying there is no escape,” said Mr Anderton. “In the old days a child would be bullied between 9am-3pm and there could be incidents on the way to and from school. But once they were home there could be a respite from that.
“But with cyberbullying they can be receiving threatening messages when they are at home.”
The charity’s comments are backed by Robert Mullaney whose 15-year-old son Tom was found hanged after allegedly being abused on a social networking site.
“This problem is not going to go away,” said 48-year-old Mr Mullaney who, along with 43-year-old wife Tracy, has campaigned for greater security measures on social networking sites.
Tom was found hanged at the bottom of his family’s home in Bournville last May. His parents believe he snapped after a single incident of cyberbullying.
A very disturbing report was released today documenting that special education children are bullied at a higher rate than non-special education children. The report, Walk a Mile in their Shoes, by Abilitypath.org, shows that disabled children are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their non-disabled peers. These statistics were combined with the tragic personal stories of some of those students who had experienced bullying.
This report confirms the fears of parents of special needs children who send their children to school but worry that their child will be mistreated. It sometimes feels to these parents that they do not have the ability to protect their children while they are at school. While it is certainly true that effective intervention can seem difficult, there certainly are proactive steps that parents can take to ensure their child’s chances of being bullied are greatly reduced. These same step will also help to ensure that if it does start, that it does not become an on-going problem.
Be a change agent: Last week, schools in San Clemente took part in Kindness Counts, a week-long campaign to encourage kindness and discourage bullying at all San Clemente public schools. Take on the challenge of leading an anti-bullying crusade at your child’s school. The truth is that bullying thrives on being unnoticed. When bullying behavior is spotlighted, it almost always decreases or ceases. By being responsible for creating awareness at your child’s school, you not only make it less likely your child will be bullied, but also that all children will be mistreated by their peers.
Make it a part of your child’s IEP: As noted in Walk a Mile in their Shoes, parents of special needs children should make sure that their child’s IEP includes goal that help protect them from bullies and their unwanted and harmful behaviors. Following are some examples of the types of goals parents who suspect their child is a victim of bullying should insist on in their child’s IEP.
Social skills goals-Bullies often pick on children who are shy and quiet. If your child fits this description, make social skills a part of their IEP. Through social skills groups and through in-class reinforcement, shy children can be taught communication skills and encouraged to give voice to the wealth of feelings they harbor within.
Self-esteem goals-Often, disabled children’s self-esteem, particularly in school, is quite low. They may have faced years of failure before their disability was recognized and addressed. That failure can lead to students feeling less than when in school. By having goals around a positive self-image, students are less likely to be bullied and more likely to report it to you as a parent or to officials at the school.
Teach reporting behavior-All students should be taught to report it when another student is making them uncomfortably or threatened at school. Incorporate into the IEP that your child be taught how to recognized and report bullying on campus.
Watch for signs that your child is being bullied-If your child is being bullied, you will be lucky if your child tells you about it. Being bullied is shameful for most children, and they are reluctant to tell others. Watch for signs that your child is being bullied. Some thing to look for is a sudden and dramatic reluctance to attend school or ride the bus. Frequent unexplained physical complaints can also be a sign of a child who is afraid to go to school. Finally, problems sleeping and/or an unexplained loss of appetite are also tell-tale warning signs.
Advocate for your child-If you find out that your child is being bullied, you must advocate for your child immediately. Go to the school and schedule a conference with your principal and teacher. Make them aware of the situation and together create an action plan of how the problem is going to be addressed. Know that schools have a responsibility to keep your child safe. If the school does not address the problem, you should report the problem to the school district or even possibly consider hiring an educational attorney.
The most important job we all have as parents is keeping our children safe. As all of us who have gone to school can unfortunately attest, young children are not always nice and sometimes they can even act awfully. As a society we too often hear stories of the suicides and tragedies that result when students are repeatedly bullied in schools. Do not let your child be a victim. Be vigilant, proactive, and a part of keeping your child safe at school.
MUSTANG, Oklahoma — A group of students in Mustang said they are being targeted on Facebook. A page on the social networking site is being used to cyber-bully pregnant teens and teen moms.
The page lists the teens who are either pregnant or are already moms then calls them various names.
“I just don’t see why we were targeted out of everyone, “said Montana Reid, one of the teens named on the site.
The girls say they found out about the page Wednesday afternoon.
“I started texting the girls saying ‘Did you all know about this?’ and they were like ‘No. what are you talking about?’,” said Carmen Hankins, another teen named on the Facebook page.
The girls say the site is upsetting to them.
“The last thing we need is people telling us how awful parents we are and how we messed up forever,” said Gabbi Preslie.
But they said it’s even worse for another teen listed who isn’t pregnant.
That teen posted “Like, this isn’t okay. I’m crying, I’m not…pregnant.”
“She was really upset. She was bawling,” recalled the teens.
A spokesperson for Mustang High School said they were made aware of the page, but it was taken down before they could see it. They say they will keep an eye on the situation to see if it causes conflict at school. But there’s little they can do if the person who made the site did so off school property.
The Mustang Police Department also said there’s nothing they can do about the site either unless it violates state law and right now there is no law against cyber bullying.
Still the girls understand how this can lead to a lot more than hurt feelings.
“I had a friend and he hung himself last weekend, cause of things like this,” said Hankins.
State Senator Andrew Rice has proposed a law this session that would give schools more jurisdiction when it comes to cyber bullying, even if it doesn’t happen on school property.
What is a bully? Aggressive behavior that is intentional, repeated over time and involves an imbalance of power or strength. Bullying can take many forms, such as hitting or punching, teasing or name-calling, intimidation through gestures, social exclusion and sending or posting insulting messages or pictures by cellphone or online (also known as cyberbullying).We now know that whether it is online, in the hallway at school or even at the office, bullies are everywhere.
Develop a safety plan with your children, such as where they should sit on the bus.
We see heart-wrenching stories of children and teenagers who have committed suicide after cruel bullying by peers. The painful truth is that 15% to 25% of students in the USA are bullied with some frequency, recent studies suggest. And more than one-third of the American workforce will experience some form of bullying during the course of their lives, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute.
The news has served as a painful call to action for Americans about the devastating consequences of bullying. Still, the victims — be they children or adults — often don’t seek help or even speak up. Kids, who may think it’s just part of growing up, are too afraid. Adults whose bosses are bullies can fear retribution in the form of losing their job.
“Our society is more aggressive, more warlike, more combative, while traits like empathy and compassion are downplayed,” says Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., and coauthor of The Bully at Work.
So what exactly can you do? Here, we offer advice from the nation’s leading bullying experts on the best way to handle the problem if your child is being bullied.
Don’t overreact.
The first thing to do is sit down with your child and calmly listen to his or her story. “Don’t immediately react emotionally and try to solve the problem,” says psychiatrist Thomas Tarshis, author of Living with Peer Pressure and Bullying. “Any reaction you have will make it harder for your kid to open up to you.”
Keep a precise, specific log.
Record the date, time, circumstances and all relevant information regarding each bullying event, Tarshis recommends. Having documented episodes to describe to school staff members, teachers, administrators and police will help you be taken seriously and track the pattern of bullying behavior.
“Walk your child through the whole story so that you get a detailed run-down of exactly what happened, who else was there, and if there were any adults there, how they responded,” says psychologist Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University. Plus, she says, “you also need to be prepared for the possibility that your child may be less than completely innocent.”
Consider contacting the parents first.
If your child is in elementary school and bullying occurs, Tarshis says, the problem can often be solved by having the parents and the children sit down together to discuss the incident. “Ninety percent of the time, it’s very effective to have everyone meet and talk about why the behavior is not acceptable, that it won’t be tolerated and that it will be met with severe consequences in the future.”
For older kids, contact the school.
Many students in middle or high school who are being bullied fear that contacting school authorities will make the abuse worse, but Tarshis says that’s often not the case. “In our studies, teens say that after they told, things did get better,” Englander says.
Attorney Rana Sampson, a San Diego-based policing consultant and former police officer, recommends writing a letter to the school principal.
“A letter puts the principal on notice that you are serious and that you expect the school to create a safe environment for your child to learn,” she says. In the letter, be highly specific about the instances of bullying and the harm it has caused, such as sleeplessness, lack of interest in school, crying or anxiety. Ask the principal to put in writing the steps the school will take to keep your child safe from the bully.
Take it higher.
Go up the chain of command if you feel your concerns are not taken seriously enough. “Any teacher or administrator who minimizes bullying by saying things such as ‘it’s part of growing up’ or ‘kids need to learn to deal with this’ needs to be re-educated on the devastating mental health and academic difficulties that arise from bullying,” Tarshis says.
Parents need to keep in mind that because of federal and state confidentiality laws, the school can’t tell the parents of the bullied child what action they’re going to take against someone else’s child. If the bullying continues, contact the police. Adds Tarshis, “Ultimately, some families have had to use lawyers to threaten legal action, which usually gets the school on board.”
Educate children about the Web.
You want your kid to be safe, but don’t threaten to take away his computer or monitor his Internet use. “For better or worse, electronic communication has become a set part of American teen culture, and the fear of losing their ability to communicate electronically with privacy may be more traumatic to them than dealing with the cyberbullying they experience,” Tarshis says. Instead, make sure he knows about using good passwords that other people aren’t able to guess and changing his privacy settings on social networking websites so that only friends can see his information.
Child protection experts say unprecedented numbers of teenagers are sharing sexually explicit images with each other and then posting them online.
Ministers have called it a ‘worrying trend’ that 38% of children between the ages of 11 and 17 have received an inappropriate message either through text, email or internet messaging.
Research from Beatbullying found that among those youngsters, 70% admitted that they knew who had sent it.
Amber Slamaker, 16, once posted suggestive pictures of herself to a social networking site but it led to unwanted attention from strangers and approaches from men looking to ‘groom’ her for sex.
She eventually managed to get the pictures deleted but knows many friends who have done similar things, usually when they have low self-esteem and are looking for attention.
Amber, from Kingston-upon-Thames, told Sky News: “Some girls look up to celebrities and think ‘I want to be like that one day, I want to look like her’.
“So they change everything about themselves just to try and be something else, something that they are not just to impress other people and then put the pictures up.”
Peter Davies, chief executive of Ceop, said: “We know that young people are increasingly using technology not only to stay in touch, but to explore their sexuality and to push the boundaries in what they send and to whom they send it.”
He added: “They often find out later that the image has been passed on to many others and as a result they can be the victims of bullying or harassment – in some rare instances we have seen these images end up in the collections of offenders.”
Professor Andy Phippen, an online safety expert at the University of Plymouth, told Sky News: “There is certainly a sub-population within the wider population that are incredibly blasé about this sort of thing.”
He has carried out detailed research with teenagers in the south-west of England which has produced striking statistics.
“Fiteen per cent of our respondents said that they do not see anything wrong with sending a naked photograph, that there is not anything inappropriate about that.
“Forty per cent of them said there is nothing wrong with a topless photograph.”
Ceop have produced a video for schools that graphically illustrates how youngsters lose control of any images as soon as they are sent or uploaded somewhere.
Teens who are already popular but trying to become even more so are the most likely to bully other kids, new research suggests.
The kids seem to think that antagonizing others will raise their own status in the eyes of their peers, according to the study, published in the February issue of the American Sociological Review.
Researchers asked about 3,700 students in 8th, 9th and 10th grades from three counties in North Carolina about their behavior toward others and how often they were the target of physical aggression, verbal aggression (such as teasing or threats), rumors or indirect bullying (such as ostracism). Teens were also asked how often they did this to a classmate.
The study team, which followed students over one school year, also asked kids to name their top five friends, then used that data to determine which kids were the most popular and at the center of the school’s social network.
Kids who were at the top of the social pecking order, but not at the very top, were the most likely to tease or be aggressive toward others.
“Status increases aggression,” said lead study author Robert Faris, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Davis. “For a long time, people perceived aggression as a maladjusted reaction to problems at home or mental health issues, but our research is consistent with the idea it’s a nasty underbelly to social hierarchies. Aggression is perceived to be a way of getting ahead.”
In fact, bullying peaked at the 98th percentile of popularity and then dropped for the most popular kids — the top 2 percent — perhaps because they no longer feel the need to put others down to improve their own status.
The average aggression rate, or the number of classmates they teased or bullied, for kids at the 98th percentile was 28 percent greater than for students at the very bottom and 40 percent greater than for students at the very top.
“Aggression could be counterproductive when you’ve reached the top,” Faris said. “It could signal insecurity with their social position. If you are at the top, you may get much more benefit from being nice.”
Kids at the very lowest end of the popularity spectrum also did little bullying, possibly because they did not have the power to even attempt it, Faris said.
Perhaps the good news is that about 67 percent of kids were not aggressive or mean toward anyone. Of the 33 percent who were, they picked on an average of about two classmates.
The maximum number of kids any one bully targeted was nine, but targeted children were picked on by as many as 17 of their classmates, the researchers found.
“Aggression can be concentrated on a few kids,” Faris said.
Girls and boys were equally as likely to bully. Kids who moved higher on the social hierarchy also increased their aggression.
So what to do about it? Rather than focus only on the bullies or their victims, programs should also include the silent majority who aren’t involved, but whose tacit support may encourage bullying. “The bystanders give people their status, and they can decide to reward aggression or scorn it,” Faris said.
Richard Gallagher, director of the Parenting Institute at New York University Child Study Center, said this research fits with prior studies linking popularity and bullying.
“Other studies have indicated that popular children are the ones more likely to get involved with teasing and sometimes bullying,” Gallagher said. “It establishes their status, and many times the kids that observe it will think that it’s deserved and justified.”
Whether such abuse actually succeeds in raising status was not measured in this study. What’s notable is that students believe it works, the authors wrote. However, they noted that the findings, which were based on 19 small-town and or rural schools, may not be replicated in other areas.
Bullying causes about 160,000 U.S. students to skip school each day, according to background information in the study. Kids who are being targeted should be taught to be assertive, but also to notify their parents and school authorities if the bullying gets out of hand, experts say.
“Parents need to recognize this is going to happen. They need to teach their kids to stand up for themselves and not be so fragile when it comes to teasing,” Gallagher said. “At the same time, we need to watch out for its excesses.”
It was just before winter break in Pennsylvania’s Hatboro-Horsham school district when Assistant Superintendent John R. Nodecker was alerted to a case of cyberbullying. Some students had created an online poll ranking the “hottest” girls in the district’s high school and middle school.
The poll quickly took on a negative and harassing tone as people posted comments about students’ appearance, gender, and sexual orientation.
Nodecker alerted the school board and superintendent, who wanted action taken. He worked with the district’s director of technology and determined some of the posts had been made from inside district schools, while others were made from off campus. He contacted school principals, who, in turn, got in touch with parents of both the students who posted the comments and those who were the targets of comments and asked for their support in dealing with it. The students were instructed to stop posting and were disciplined.
Megan Meier, 13, Immaculate Conception Catholic School, Dardenne Prairie, Mo. Committed suicide Oct. 17, 2006, after experiencing cyberbullying from former friends—and one mother—through a fake MySpace account.
Nodecker contacted the poll’s hosting site, GoDaddy.com, to request that the poll be taken down, but received no response, though the site has an abuse hotline available 24 hours a day. However, the 5,000-student district’s technology director was able to block access to the site from school grounds.
“By noon the next day, we had done all of these things, and the message was very strongly sent to our students that we don’t want this happening,” Nodecker says. “This told students we’re not going to run away from these incidents.”
Tragedies tied to cyberbullying have made national headlines: the story of 15-year-old Massachusetts student Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide in January 2010 after extensive cyberbullying; the suicide of 13-year-old Missouri student Megan Meier in 2006 after she was targeted through the social-networking site MySpace.
But school leaders across the country are dealing with more-routine cases daily and often feel they have little legal advice or precedent to guide them in their decision making.
Tyler Clementi, 18, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. Committed suicide Sept. 22, 2010, after his college roommate secretly recorded, and then posted on YouTube, a video of Clementi having a sexual encounter with a male student.
Case law regarding student speech, particularly off-campus speech, is outdated, many legal experts say. School leaders say it’s unclear just what actions they can take in some cyberbullying cases. And recent rulings in cases that have dealt with some forms of cyberbullying haven’t clarified the matter.
Most current rulings pertain to students’ harassment of administrators instead of cyberbullying between students. In fact, two 2010 cyberbullying cases with similar scenarios received opposite rulings by the same court and, as a consequence, are being closely watched by educators and legal experts.
To further complicate matters for school officials, many states now have laws that specifically address cyberbullying, often requiring schools and districts to adopt anti-cyberbullying policies and programs but providing little guidance or funding for doing so.
The U.S. Department of Education is also examining bullying issues. It held its first-ever bullying “summit” in August 2010 and sent out a Dear Colleague letter to school leaders emphasizing the need to take action against bullying. While the letter clarified the statutes that allow school leaders to take action in such cases, it did not specifically mention cyberbullying. However, federal education officials say they expect to release guidance for school leaders on cyberbullying in the spring.
Against that backdrop, parents, politicians, and civic leaders are putting increasing pressure on school leaders to “do something” about the wave of cyberbullying being reported in the media. “There’s a confusion to the entire situation,” Nodecker says. The case law and state and federal requirements, he says, leave school and district leaders “in a kind of place where every situation seems like a test case.”
Phoebe Prince, 15, South Hadley High School, South Hadley, Mass. Committed suicide Jan. 14, 2010, after experiencing cyberbullying through social media and text messages.
‘It’s Beyond Murky’
Schools should have no qualms about taking action when cyberbullying affects the school setting, causing a safety issue either to other students or to faculty members, says Francisco M. Negrón Jr., the general counsel for the National School Boards Association, based in Alexandria, Va.
But the legalities surrounding how schools can respond in less clear-cut cases of cyberbullying are bewildering, to say the least, says Thomas E. Wheeler, the chairman of the Council of School Attorneys, a group affiliated with the NSBA, and a partner in the Indianapolis law firm of Frost Brown Todd LLC. “It’s beyond murky. It’s contradictory,” he says.
The legal starting point is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling on student speech in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which centered on students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. In that case, the school banned the armbands under its dress code and disciplined students who wore them. Students challenged the policy, and the Supreme Court overturned the ban, stating that “students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.”
In its 7-2 ruling, the court limited schools’ authority to curtail controversial student speech to instances when speech “substantially and materially” disrupts a school’s educational mission, or when the speech impinges on the rights of other students to learn.
But that ruling dealt with on-campus speech, Wheeler says, and cyberbullying often takes place off campus from home computers or mobile devices. Because of that difference, legal experts often look to the 2007 decision in Morse v. Frederick, in which the Supreme Court upheld a student’s suspension for speech that took place across the street from the school because the speech, in the view of the principal, promoted the use of illegal drugs. The court reasoned in its 5-4 ruling that because schools “may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use,” school officials did not violate the First Amendment by confiscating a banner displayed off campus, but near the school, that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”
Cyberbullying speech has muddied the waters, however. School officials “want to step in, but their collective hands have been slapped by the courts so many times that they are reluctant,” says Kathleen Conn, an assistant professor in the doctorate of education program at Neumann University in Aston, Pa., and an expert on cyberbullying.
For example, in two cases with decisions released on the same day last year by two separate three-judge panels of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, the court reached opposite conclusions on whether a school violated students’ First Amendment rights by disciplining students who created separate defamatory and fake social-networking profiles of their respective principals.
In both cases, J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District and Layshock ex. rel. Layshock v. Hermitage School District, students used an off-campus computer to create a fake profile of a school principal. In both cases, the profile sparked a reaction on campus and enraged the principal. And in each case, the principal reacted by suspending the student.
In the twin Feb. 4, 2010, decisions, the 3rd Circuit ruled that the student suspension was proper only in the J.S. case. In the Layshock case, the court found that the school district could not establish “a sufficient nexus” between the student’s cyber speech and a substantial disruption of the school environment.
The rulings in both cases have since been vacated, and the full 3rd Circuit court reheard the cases in June 2010. As of mid January, the court had not released any revised decisions in the cases, but legal experts and school leaders were anxiously awaiting them.
Wheeler of the Council of School Attorneys believes one of the cases may ultimately make it to the Supreme Court, which he hopes will step in to clarify the law surrounding school administrators’ reach in cyberbullying cases.
“I feel significant compassion for, and totally understand, the difficult situation principals are in,” says Nancy Willard, a lawyer and the executive director of the Eugene, Ore.-based Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. “The legal standards are unclear, and if [school leaders] don’t have a policy that addresses cyberbullying, they end up getting in an argument with parents.”
Policies and Punishments
Cyberbullying presents many challenges for educators, Willard says. It often feels unfamiliar and doesn’t play out the way a traditional bullying case might. In addition, many educators don’t understand the culture of social networking and the extreme impact that negative interactions in the online world can have on students, she says.
“These incidents are occurring and growing in the online environment where there are no responsible adults present, so traditional bullying prevention, which gravitated toward more adult supervision, … is not going to work here,” Willard says. “It’s not going to translate.”
Eric C. Sheninger, the principal of New Jersey’s New Milford High School and a proponent of social networking in education, believes most administrators want to do something when they become aware of cyberbullying, whether it takes place in school or off campus, despite the legal obstacles.
“We have to act because of the effect it has impacting students’ emotional well-being,” he says. “If students don’t feel emotionally safe or comfortable in school, it’s going to impact their ability to focus and engage with other students.”
One key component of dealing with the problem is having thoughtful policies in place before incidents take place, Willard says.
When Principal Dwight Lundstrom found himself dealing with two different types of cyberbullying in December at Oak Harbor High School in Oak Harbor, Wash., he relied heavily on his district’s already-crafted policies.
In the first situation, a group of students created a fake Facebook account for another student, and posts on the site turned mean-spirited. When Lundstrom was alerted, his administration quickly tracked down the students who initiated the site. Lundstrom says he was surprised because the culprits were so-called “good kids.”
In the second case, a student received a threatening text message at school that included a bomb threat against the building. Lundstrom’s district has a very clear cellphone search-and-seizure policy, which received national attention when it was adopted last year, and his administrators were able to track down the cellphone that sent the message, search its texting history, and determine that another student who had borrowed the phone sent the threat.
In the Facebook incident, the offending students were chastised, but received no official school discipline, in part because the bullying took place off campus. Instead of suspensions or detentions, the students were required to write papers on the effects of cyberbullying. In the second case, the student involved got several days of suspension and had to write a paper about the effects a bomb threat can have on the school and the community.
Lundstrom says he often has students involved in cyberbullying write essays as a learning tool and disciplinary measure, or gets them involved in mediation with guidance counselors or other educators, and he remains aware of the legal scrutiny his actions could be under.
“We have to tie the cyberbullying to affecting the school” in order to take formal disciplinary action, he says.
“The real issue here is whether public schools have the legal authority to deal with actions that occur off premises, in off hours, at a non-school-sanctioned event,” says Parry Aftab, a lawyer who founded several Internet-safety organizations, including WiredSafety and Stopcyberbullying.org.
“The answer is they don’t have the legal authority, … but when it drifts into school in any way, it’s like the Midas touch.”
The Parent Factor
Despite the community clamor for a tougher approach to cyberbullying, some school leaders have been surprised by the response of parents when such cases arise.
Some parents of cyberbullies support schools in their disciplinary stances against those students, who studies show are often not stereotypical playground tough guys, but quiet, bright students. But more often, school leaders say parents of cyberbullies either say they want to discipline their children themselves or they dismiss the cyberbullying as harmless joking.
“One of the biggest challenges I face is parents who try to downplay the bullying as if it’s not occurring, and try to talk their way around it,” says Jason C. Briggs, the principal of the 520-student St. Gregory the Great School, a K-8 Catholic school in Hamilton Square, N.J.
For proactive schools, education and prevention to combat cyberbullying are ongoing. Many schools and districts, like Lundstrom’s 5,700-student Oak Harbor school system, now have policies that specifically prohibit cyberbullying, spelling out its characteristics, the actions principals and other administrators may take against it, and the disciplinary actions students can expect to receive for violations.
In addition, some schools and districts work closely with law enforcement on cyberbullying issues. In some cases, criminal charges—from criminal impersonation to criminal harassment—have been filed against cyberbullies.
Aftab even recommends that schools draw up a contract, to be signed by parents, that requests permission to address cyberbullying that doesn’t happen during school hours and on school property, as if it did.
Ongoing education is the key, experts say. Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary for the Department of Education’s office of safe and drug-free schools, says he’s sympathetic to school leaders’ predicament. But he suggests that preventive measures, like anti-bullying curricula, increase the emphasis on appropriate online behavior, and that ongoing parental education can head off significant problems. Despite the lack of legal clarity on cyberbullying, he says school leaders must act.
“When an administrator chooses not to act, they’re saying, ‘It’s more important for me to protect the district than the student.’ That is the wrong set of priorities. They have to understand what’s at stake here. Children are dying.”
In Maryland’s 103,000-student Baltimore County schools, a pilot program that teaches students about cyberbullying and digital citizenship through the library media curriculum was set to launch in January, says Della A. Curtis, the district’s coordinator of library information services.
“There’s a fear factor that educators have with all these social-media tools,” she says. “I don’t want us to be an ostrich putting our heads in the sand. It’s the reality of how our kids choose to communicate and learn.”
LIKE more than 500 million people around the world, I have a Facebook account.
My son, who is eight years of age, would like one too. Aside from the fact that his mother and I don’t think it’s wise for a child of his age to be surfing the internet, Facebook doesn’t allow it. Most popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, restrict the minimum age of their users to 13. But that doesn’t stop pre-teens from setting up accounts by entering a false age.
Resourceful
A large part of the appeal of Facebook is its accessibility. It’s ridiculously easy to set up an account. Just to prove it, I set up a page in my son’s name. All I needed was an email address (which his mother and I have the password for) and when it came to entering his age, I simply wrote that he was five years older than he actually is. Simple. It takes less than five minutes.
“It’s up to parents themselves,” says Catherine Bolger, registered psychologist with DIT. “They have a responsibility to strictly supervise their children’s and young teens’ access to any internet sites — not just social networking sites. It sounds obvious but parents need to know what their children are doing.”
But pre-teens are resourceful and have embraced technology with an ease that their parents can sometimes find difficult to comprehend. And it’s not just a question of monitoring the family’s computer any more — most mobile phones now have internet capabilities.
More children can now use a smart-phone than can tie their own shoelaces or make breakfast, according to a January 2011 survey by software company AVG. In the poll of 2,200 mothers with internet access and children aged between two and five, more children knew how to play with a smart-phone app (19pc) than tie their own shoelaces.
While there are no statistics available to indicate how many pre-teens have social networking accounts, Facebook themselves say that they take a zero-tolerance line with those who give a false age when signing up.
“Facebook has systems in place to prevent people who identify themselves as under the age of 13 from creating accounts,” says a Facebook spokesperson when asked about their age verification process. “It’s a violation of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (http://facebook.com/terms.php) to provide false birth-date information, and we have community verification systems after sign-up to help identify people who are doing this so we can take action.”
Police
Facebook admits that age verification is a difficult area to police. “There is no ‘perfect’ solution when it comes to age verification — on Facebook or anywhere else on the web. A child of any age can head to a search engine and look for whatever they want, from perfectly acceptable material to the highly unsavoury. What the Facebook environment offers in contrast to the wider internet is, in effect, a walled garden that enables teens to share the best of the web and consume it in a safe place where unacceptable content is quickly removed.”
If Facebook itself doesn’t have the answer, what hope do parents have? When it comes to social networking, they can either use software to block the websites or can give in to their pre-teens’ requests and allow them to set up accounts online.
Neither is a real solution, say experts. Linda Criddle, author of Look Both Ways: Help Protect Your Family on the Internet says parents should respect the guidelines of any website that their child wants to join. “Doing otherwise teaches children that it’s okay to disregard the terms and conditions of the service,” she says.
Blocking social networking websites is not the answer, says Simon Grehan of Webwise.ie, a Government, sponsored safety initiative, providing internet safety information, advice and tools for parents and teachers.
“Parents have to take a common-sense approach. Parents have to open the lines of communication rather than just looking for filtering options to block social networking sites.”
Although Facebook has self-imposed the 13-year-old restriction, Grehan says that parents should judge for themselves when a child is ready for these types of websites. “Parents know their children better than anyone else. Some kids of 11 are very mature, while some kids of 15 are very immature. So parents themselves are best placed to make the decision of when their children are ready.”
Cyber-bullying remains a big concern of many parents. Last year the case of Irish teen Phoebe Prince made international headlines. The 15-year-old girl, who moved with her family to Massachusetts, was allegedly subjected to a sustained campaign of online abuse, which prosecutors have said led to her suicide in January 2010. And it’s not an isolated incident. Newspapers and the internet are littered with stories about cyber bullying and worse on networking sites.
But parents should take heart. Irish kids are among the most responsible users of social networking websites, according to a Europe-wide study conducted late in 2010.
The EU Kids Online research found that Irish children are the least likely to publish their address or phone number on their profile (just 7pc in Ireland compared to 14pc in Europe) and most likely to have a private profile (11pc). Irish children are less likely to encounter key risk factors — pornography, bullying, sending/receiving sexual messages, going to meetings with contacts first met online– than most of their European peers. Children here ranked 21 out of 23 for having seen sexual images online in the past 12 months.
But the more children use the internet, the more they are likely to encounter risk. Next Tuesday, February 8, is Safer Internet Day, and to mark the occasion, a new online resource is to be launched to help parents get involved in what their children are doing online, (www.facebook.com/ webwise). Communication is the key when it comes to the internet, says Aine Lynch, CEO of the National Parents Council Primary, which is involved in the Internet Safer Day: “One of the reasons children say that they don’t tell parents about things they come across on the internet that they feel uncomfortable with, is they feel that their parent may take away access to the computer. So it is important that you reassure your child that they can come to you about anything they may have seen on the internet.”
Aine advises that parents establish ground rules with their children: “It is important to talk to your child about the areas of personal information and meeting with online friends. For rules and boundaries to be really effective they are best developed between you and your child. If your child has had an input in developing the agreement in relation to their internet usage they are more likely to see the rules and sanctions as fair and are therefore more likely to abide by them.
“Rules should be very clear that your child does not give out personal information.”
For more see www.facebook.com/ webwise or www.webwise.ie
Bullying seems to be a rite of passage for the youth of this country, but until recently it hasn’t come to the forefront in the media. Why is this?
Has traditional bullying (which does not include cyber bullying) actually increased or does it just seem that way because of how lawmakers and the media are portraying the situation?
Izzy Kalman, a school psychologist, author of “A Psychological Solution to Bullying” and creator of the anti-bullying website Bullies2Buddies, said bullying is a growing problem because of society’s increased desire to target the problem.
“But the harder you try to make the problem disappear, the worse it gets, and the more time and resources you end up spending to fight it,” Kalman said. “It becomes a never-ending problem that spirals out of control.”
Now though, the government has stepped in. Various state legislatures have proposed new laws which require schools to provide anti-bullying programs, as well as policies to address the growing concern for school safety.
Jane Gross, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in Hamden, Conn., added that bullying has always been evident.
“When you call attention to something, it increases,” Gross said. “The energy of the media is now being pulled in that direction. People are now just really talking about it.”
She also said the media is negatively affecting bullying and only increases public fear on the issue.
According to Kalman, bullying experts, anti-bullyingorganizations and psychological researchers are collaborating to promote public awareness, adding that a parent’s fear of bullying has surpassed their fear of drugs.
But even with new laws put in place and the media hysteria surrounding bullying, knowing the ways to stop yourself from being a victim are the key to getting out of this vicious cycle.
Gross said students should know it is not their fault if they are being bullied. She advises students to not talk back to the bully, show little emotion, and not add fuel to the fire.
“Students should report the person to whoever is in authority and reach out to friends,” Gross said. “Students should gather forces to stop this serious problem.”
Kalman said one of the best ways to handle bullying is to adopt intervention plans. Schools can teach “assertiveness training and provide good social skills lessons.”
But will the school’s intervention truly help?
“We could only hope these programs are positive,” Gross said.
On the internet, where, as the old New Yorker cartoon adage goes, no one knows you’re a dog, online impersonation is easy. That’s created a climate that is ripe for exploitation, and in California – often the first mover in new frontiers of the law – new legislation took effect on the first day of the new year that makes online impersonation, or “e-personation”, a specific crime.
