The Rise of Cyber Bullying

santos_douglas writes "The Detroit Free Press has an article detailing the problems schoolchildren now face in the form of online cyber bullying. As if parents didn't already have enough to worry about! Examples include rumor spreading typically via text messaging, threatening emails, invasive pictures taken with camera phones, and the most extreme - creating entire websites to criticize/threaten/harass another student. The article suggests many tips for combating the problem - chief among them being the establishment of specific school policies. I suppose this is another example of an inevitable downside to the interconnected world. Mandatory Google search for your added reading pleasure."

Comments

Yet another...

[insmod_ex]

scapegoat for parents to blame their kids moronic actions on. "OH NO, HES BEEN CYBER BULLIED, AND WE DIDNT DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!!" Parents need to take responsibility. GTA is not why your kid is a fucking asshole.

Missing Link?

[xRizen]

How come there's no link to these so called "invasive pictures"?

W000, dumass subject. dumass writer.

[TyrranzzX]

Although I am suprised the starwars kid hasn't killed himself to end the pain or in the very least, locked himself in a room far away from the dark recesses of the internet to keep away from the scrutiny, I think this article is a tub of bullshit. Mabye in the more social, personal, chatty circles where anyone will believe anything because they are dumasses it may be a problem, but for the rest of us geeks who handle their communication more like TCP/IP rather than humans it isn't much of a problem. Inotherwords, anyone who said "Omg, I didn't expect that" is a complete dumass; where there's a way to communicate there will always be dumasses using it.

Then again, school teachers have never thought it was their responsability to keep bullies from giving someone a verbal beating, but rather, to ensure that the bullies don't end up paralyzed from the neck down by a lucky punch of kick or full of bulletholes in my experience. Which is the whole reason these things happen because if the bully was educated and understood "If you piss jonny off enough, he will inflict great pain on you and may even kill you. Think columbine. Understand?" the kid might think it's a bad idea to tease other kids so badly they think it's a good idea to go on a killing spree. Of course, it may also be a good idea to hold verbal abuse on the level of physical abuse. While much harder to proove, if the annoying asshole who teased you got the crap kicked out of him he'd think twice about opening his big toothy maw, and if he got a detention for starting it he'd be real suprised at the fact the system actually worked. It's only logical that as new technology comes along it'll be abused in the same way.

I'm also kind of annoyed at this title "The rise of cyber bullying". What idiot thought it necissary or even interesting to write this article? Oh yea, after reading the first sentance the light went on in the brain; the same ones who try to make parents afraid of everything from antrhax in the mail to other parents abducting their kids. It's idiots like this that I'd like to take out into the street and beat into a bloody pulp, if they didn't do what they did then our culture wouldn't be so afraid of itself. If television wasn't the constant dispenser of FUD it is then people would let their kids go out on haloween and have fun or it could be like in the 1970's when the real asshole of a teacher got tp'd. If this kind of bullshit didn't exist parents would actually be decent and not have an escape from their responsabilities into the land of idiocy to bring back thoughtful and stupid ideas about parenting some idiot, given an austere of legitimancy by writing for an newspaper that lets them be more comfertable about raising their kids.

So, in my mind this gets filed under the "trivial bullshit" section where I keep most of my useless drivvel; behind steel walls so it doesn't seep into the other stuff by accident.

aww, they're so cute when they kiss

[rhizome]

dude, if you want to touch another guy, just ask them.

otherwise, revenge is stupid and it only continues a cycle of violence. it doesn't matter if you don't have the imagination to eliminate the conflict from your life without violence, it's the violence that is lame. However, with a nick like "Lord Frodo" it may be a foregone conclusion that you view the world in terms of battle. it doesn't seem to matter to you that your bully (or his friends) just moved on to the next weakest kid.