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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."
i'm totally at a loss for this one. what could suck more!? every embarassing thing i did in 6th-8th grade now only resides in the distant memory of classmates. i'd probably kill myself if it was part of the internet for ever and ever. (hell, i'm still embarassed by dumbass posts i made to usenet in the 90's!)
this is a very interesting side-effect of the 'net. i don't know if this can be remedied, but it does imply that children now have accept the possibility of total transparency in their lives. as hard as it is to swallow, maybe this is how the new culture begins...
i would say i'm glad i'm not her, but this could, in reality, happen to ANYONE. it's just harder to ignore as a child, and it's harder to sue for libel/slander. but still, who to sue?
gah.
the transparent society is gonna suck.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Am I the only one who sees a problem with giving schools control over students' lives beyond campus grounds? Why is it that some people are so quick to abdicate control and responsibility of their children to a government beaurocracy? Are today's parents really that bad? Is the government that eager to monitor/regulate every aspect of our lives?
It's time for people to stop blaming the school system and making out kids the taxpayers' problem. If your kid is a fuck-up, be a goddamned parent and put them in their place! Stop automatically run crying to the government!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
At first read I found this laughable but after a bit of thought I see a rekindling of an already occurring problem. Children will always be children, they will always be immature, they will always be impressionable. The problem herein is parents. I have a 10yo, and 11yo. They do not go on the internet without permission and they conduct themselves as we dictate. No chat rooms, no e-mails from anyone we dont already know. The parents of all there friends form a network with us via e-mail and the children are aware of this. They also respect it understanding the inherent dangers of the internet. Using yahoo parental controls anyone sending them e-mails with profanities or pre flagged words gets reported to us. If the account they are using is linked to a parental account reporting it to the parent is easy. So before someone starts blaming the internet look to the Parents.
I'm sure I'll get modded Troll for this one but...
Is it really a school's responsibility to deal with this?? Would a school be held accountable if signs of a derogatory nature were put up around town?
The school should do something if the site is created on school property, but I don't know if there is anything they should have to do otherwise.
Still, this sucks. I can't begin to say how glad I am that this was not around when i was in school.
For one thing, such e-messages are traceable records; bullying in person is insidious because they're usually careful to make sure that no one actually can prove they did it. Parents and school officials can use these to deal with the bullies promptly.
On the other hand, kids need to be taught how to deal with stuff like that, and probably the tabloid press is a good place to use as an example: show them how some celebrities take it too seriously and waste a lot of time an energy fighting it, while others make fun of it and ignore it.
They can also make use of it to find out who their real friends are. People who believe everything they hear without checking at the source aren't much of a friend in the first place.
Sorry, but "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me" doesn't hold true. Verbal abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. BTW, I didn't think SMS was anon - I thought it'd give you the phone number (there are many services that WILL send anon SMS, though - just over the internet)
Actually, it's been shown that psychological pain causes the exact same portion of the brain to react as from physical pain. In other words, your brain can't tell the difference. And let's face it: Physical trauma (up to a point), doesn't leave the lasting emotional pain that psychological trauma can.
And you can stand up to a bully who's threatening you physically and get him to leave you alone (at least, it worked that way for me when I was in 7th grade). How do you stop anonymous rumors and character assassination?
Wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity for the nerds to get even with the bullies?
I did precisely that, by embarrassing them. What could be worse for the "cool guy's" tough image than getting kicked in the throat by the fat nerdy black kid?
Before you ask, yes I did this. Later that same year, I lifted a kid 2 years older than me off of his feet and blackened his eye with a haymaker right hand.
We need to start teaching children how to defend themselves. Regardless of school policy, legally you have the right to defend yourself. If bullies are pushing your kid around, if bullies are beating your kid up, give your child the means to defend him/herself. Let your kid know that even if he/she gets in trouble at school for standing up for him/herself, you'll back him/her up.
Thankfully my mother let me off of the leash, so to speak, that the school tried to keep me on. Beat the bullies senseless two or three times, and guess what, they leave you alone.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They only last if you let them. Learn to ignore it. And yes, it *can* be ignored, and it *can* be dealt with at that age. I managed it, and those freaks were merciless to me. But after a while they get tired of it, and move on.
Just takes willpower, which kids today are not being trained to use or improve.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Being bullied is getting pushed down a flight of stairs, not getting an anonymous text message about how dopey your shoes look. Sheesh.
No.
Clearly you weren't one of the kids who got called "Fatty fat fat fatass" every day in junior high school... if you had been, you'd know the kind of lasting damage that words can cause.
PS Your shoes look dopey.
I find it interesting that a lot of the replies here deal with "how nerds can get back at the cyberbullies".
Very few, if any, are assuming that the nerds ARE the cyberbullies.
Bullying is about strength. In the real world, that can be physical or political/social. In the internet, that can be technical prowess. He who hacks better, bullies better.
Ironic that this would show up here on Slashdot because this kind of shit happens here all the time. Note: the vast majority of people here don't abuse this site...I have a small minority of abusers in mind as I write this.
/. journal almost like still having MsGeek.Org, the only diff is that someone else has to worry about security issues and assholes. It's too bad... /. used to be fun a few years ago.
Let's face it, guys, cyberbullying happens here all the time...a few twits calling each other queer, indulging in the cyber equivalent of towel-snapping in the locker room, modding people down as "flamebait," "troll," and "overrated" just because you don't agree with them or they rub you the wrong way...the irony is so thick it's not even funny.
MsGeek.Org closed down because of a group of cyberbullies and their extended attack on the site. Many of the people responsible still post here, and often. The crapflooders never have, and never will, provide anything of value on this site...they just shovel out the same crap, the same disgusting gay porn and disguised links to goatse and tubgirl. Someone needs to hit the entire lot of the crapflooders over their collective heads with a clue by four...it stopped being "cute" or "funny" years ago.
I kicked the WIPO Troll off my site and got his account pulled because he posted hardcore gay porn pics to my board using an IE exploit. He came by it rightly. I specifically started MsGeek.Org to give women in technology a "clean, well-lighted" environment to post on a Slashdot-like forum. The crapflooders ruined that, up to and including running exploits against the board software itself. The security issues got to be so much for the good people at Hosting Matters that we mutually decided it wasn't worth it.
I wish that Taco and Hemos and the rest of the founders here had the cojones to pull the accounts of those who have made posting here uncomfortable for many people. I have no problems dealing with it...I'm a 10-year Usenet veteran with the virtual purple hearts to prove it. But I have gotten emails from women who don't read Slashdot because the crap posts are so disturbing to them.
Anyway, this is why I continue to have comments turned off on my journal. I wanted one place where I couldn't be shouted down by a small minority of obnoxious idiots, and I have it. I am sorry that the stupid yahoo.com address always gets filled up with spam and people can't get email to me there. I intend to find another webmail account with a bit more space so you have some way of contacting me. I might even break down and pay Yahoo for a bigger mailbox. Whatever.
I was going to post this anonymously, but screw it...do your worst. Mod it down to Kingdom Come. I don't care anymore. Karma is worthless at this point anyway...I posted for awhile under an identity I used when posting from work, and it took me a grand total of 2 months to go from newbie to the 50 point cap. W00t. That account could have been used to troll like a mofo...instead, I retired it, Blade Runner stylee. I don't even remember the password on the account anymore, fuck it.
I'll chime in every now and again, but right now the main reason I use this site is to blog. My
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Just as I would imagine was the _alot_ of guys here, I too got picked on when I was in Junior High. For years..Got randomly spit on, punched, kicked, you name it..by a group of about 3 or 4 of em, all older than me. It was a real blast, lemmie tell ya.
Then one day, I decided I about had enough, picked up a desk, and sent it crashing straight down ontop of one of them. Crushed his larynx. He couldn't talk for months, and even when he regained his speech, he sounded like Popeye. Karma works in mysterious ways.
Anyway, back to the story. I got taken by no less than three teachers down to the Principal's office, where I was given a "5 day out-of-school suspension".. One notch below formal expulsion back in those days. Interestingly, my folks backed me up, and essentially told the school to fuck off, since I had no prior record of doing anything even remotely like that, the school knew this kid was a bully, and never bothered to do anything about him. Bottom line, I was back in school within a day...And even more interestingly, I never had a problem with any of the other bullies after that. Didn't hear a single peep.
Thats not to say I advocate violence. I don't. But if you're dealing with what amounts to a juvenille sociopath who's parents can't control him, and a school who won't protect your kid, then that's what you have to do.
I really, really don't understand how we, as a culture, arrived at the idea that we should expect our kids to "just ignore them", or "talk it out" with a bully. That has never, and will never solve anything. At the end of the day, you have a God-given right to defend yourself and your dignity. End of story.
I'm going to be a father myself, pretty soon..And if theres anything i'd want my kid to learn from my experience, it would be that if ever gets bullied, and decides to beat the snot out of some kid to reclaim a portion of his dignity, Mom & Dad will back him up on it. Ultimately, he has to learn how to handle confrontations in life. Somewhere along the line, they're going to have to learn what "nobody walks all over you without your permission" means.
It just seems my whole generation was brought up to think that "ball your fist up and teach the asshole a lesson" isn't an option.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Come on. I read through the whole article and didn't see a single thing that didn't happen when I went to school, pre-Internet. Or, for that matter, I didn't read anything that I didn't hear from my parents' stories about when they went to school.
The article spent four fifths of its copy trying to make out that teasing and gossip-spreading were something novel and Internet-age. Yeah, sure. Before text-messages, kids just had no way of insulting or passing information to each other. Certainly, no schoolgirl has ever been teased about her clothes, or boy about his sexuality, before the age of the Dark, Nasty Internet.
Children are vicious. They learn the need to establish a social hierarchy long before they learn empathy. Paul Graham covers this phenomenon quite effectively in one of his essays.
Sure, the "instant-on" thing is new, but really, kids will do exactly what adults do when they want to get away from unwanted IMs: go invisible, or register a second screen-name that only their friends know.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, but it's not a new problem. I abhor lazy journalism that finds sensationalism in dressing up something as old as time (pornography, bullying, copying music) in Internet clothes, just because it's easier to scare people that way.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
From the perspective of a victim, your comment is the equivalent of blaming the woman for getting raped. Yes, it's that bad.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Interesting points...though none of the physical bullying I endured hurt more than the wounds themselves. I'm more concerned about the emotional scarring which bullying does...and the smaller the school is, the worse the problem can be. You can taunt back, but that does nothing to correct the problem in the first place. Kids can be the most cruel sometimes...and it's tough for a genuinely nice kid who gets picked on to savagely fight back.
This is going to sound wrong, and probably modded as such, but the more bullies continue to fuck around, the more likely we're going to have another school massacre. Kids do have breaking points just like anyone else...and it seems like a lot of people don't remember that. If it gets bad enough, they'll kill themselves or someone else.
I disagree that parents can put things in perspective. For example, I was walked out on at a dance when I was 14 in front of most of the school. It was quite the funny event to a lot of the school. Importance now? Zero. Importance then? Catastrophic.
Taken insults...if done so over a long enough period, a kid can get so closed off that it can cause nearly permanent emotional damage and stunt the development of normal peer relationships. "Suck it up" is an inadequate strategy.
I have to agree with several other posters on this thread that the school has no jurisdiction as to what happens outside of school property and school hours. Then again, I'm not proposing answers.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
This gets lots of laughs, and gives liqudsin the attention he craves. The net effect is to discourage outward signs of intelligence by belittling the "nerds." Ha Ha Ha. You sure are cool.
God forbid anybody is smart in this dumbed-down society.
Pathetic.
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One of the most important parts of growing up is learning how to deal with violence. In particular, learning when to use violence, and when not to use violence. Learning when and how to escalate or deescalate a violent encounter. Violence is a part of society and of human existence. It is inescapable. As long as we have fists and teeth there will be bullying, robbery, rape and war, and the need to defend oneself from these. Violence is neither right nor wrong in and of itself. It is a merely a tool.
For example, if a thief snatched a purse from an old woman and three guys jumped the thief and beat him up, they would be heroes and their action would be morally right. If three guys jump a random guy on the street and thrash him, they would be criminals and morally wrong. If you are threatened with a gun and you shoot back with your own gun, your use of violence would be justified. If someone called you names and you shot him, you would be wrong.
A child needs to learn these things and more. If he is male in many societies, he will be expected to be the defender of his family and his nation. He may have to mercilessly kill and maim as a soldier if his nation is under attack, the ultimate shame and the ultimate honor. He must come to terms with that.
How a child responds to bullying and whether or not he bullies others is part of the process of learning about violence. It will determine whether he eventually becomes a felon, a bully, a coward, a doormat, or simply a well-adjusted member of society. I feel that many children aren't learning the right lessons. The whole topic has somehow become taboo in public discourse, like sex education was in the past.
If a child is forbidden to fight back, even after all reasonable peaceful methods of resolving the issue have been exhausted, then he will learn to be walked on. He will never learn when and how much violence is right or wrong and develop a healthy spectrum of responses to violence. These are the people who will silently be bullied one day, then kill everyone with SMGs the next, since they know of nothing between total submission and total war. Conversely, if a child is allowed to bully others, or to escalate to violence before peaceful means are exhausted, then he is on his way to jail if nothing is done.
There is some happy medium between psychopath and pacifist, between bully and victim. It is enshrined in a society's laws and culture, and transmitted through media and family. A child needs to discover it. He needs to learn how to respond to an insult, a malicious rumor, a threat, a punch, a gun and a war. It's just part of growing up.
Never start a fight, but always end one. Violence must be avoided as far as possible, but no further. Violence is always wrong, but sometimes it is also right.