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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."
In grade/middle school some people resented me because of my grades/intelligence. You know what I did when I got picked on? I picked back. A witty remark will often slow a bully quite well. Sure, this isn't a very civilized situation, but who ever said that kids were civilized?
At least, there is no physical harm done in cyber-bullying. There's also no reasonable way to stop it. Shall we enact rules for school children that they never say anything that isn't nice on school time or off? Some of the examples amount to slander, and if they get particularly bad, you could bring a suit, but c'mon there are enough lawsuits now without every school child suing every other child for slander.
I realize that being made fun of isn't very pleasant, but that's something that kids have to deal with. Their parents should help put it in perspective.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
The idea of schools having policies about what students can do online (from their homes, not from school) is absurd. Sure, schools don't like it, but there's a much more serious problem of schools imposing jurisdiction outside of school. Schools have responsibility for students when they are on school grounds, participating in school functions, or on school-provided transportation. Other than that, the minute a student steps off school grounds, the school should have no jurisdiction over him.
Granted, if a student posts pictures on a private web site, and those pictures were taken at school in violation of a stated policy, then there could be room for action.
Right. But this sounds more like a girl thing, where bullying is verbal--rumors, character assassination, etc.
I was a Scrawny Geek(TM), and I got the bejeezus knocked out of me on a regular basis (until I finally learned how to fight). But when I saw what was done to my female counterparts, I was glad all I had to deal with was getting the occasional beatdown. All an asshole jock could hand me was some humiliation and maybe a trip to the hospital.
The girls got utterly destroyed, in ways no physical harm could match.
My theory on this is that from middle through high school, boys form a linear hierarchy of individuals. We're constantly moving up and down on it, usually within a fairly narrow range, within which most boys find their small circle of friends. With few exceptions, each boy is on there somewhere.
Girls form a hierarchy of groups whose position is fairly fixed. The girls within a group are of roughly equal stature, but there might be one or two leaders. A particular girl is either all the way in or all the way out of a particular group, and some are out of all the groups altogether. Very few boys ever have to deal with that level of alienation (and most of the boys I know who were that far off the hierarchy were off by choice).
Having never been female, though, that's just speculation; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I agree wholeheartedly, I'm 15 and at high school in the UK. Today the latest rules to 'improve discipline and school image' were revealed, they basically consist of forcing girls to remove all make-up (on top of the extremely strict uniform we've already got) and pushing us all to have school IDs which do not, AFAICS, have any purpose at all.
Not only are they wasting their time with pointless rules, they're failing miserably in educating us properly. The fact is that all they are drilling into our heads now is facts to pass exams, not understanding. I generally have a good memory for this type of information and therefore get bored quickly - given the chance I could probably learn a years syllabus in a week and do OK on the exam. IMO the solution would be give the higher ability students the chance to understand the work on a higher level, but not according to the school, all I get is a conversation something along the lines of:
"Why aren't you working?"
"I finished it all."
"Is your shirt button undone?"
"Errr.. yes, sorry"
"Sit in silence for the rest of the lesson, and you've got a detention if that button's undone again"
This is the worse end of the teaching, but it's still a daily occurance.
You got that right. I was so disturbed by the way other kids treated me (and other kids, whenever they weren't harrassing me) that as a teenager I vowed I'd never have kids at all, because I didn't want them to go through what happened to me (or worse, become one of the bullies).
Then, in college, I was introduced to some families that homeschooled and their kids sure were different than my school peers were. Now I have 3 kids (11 to 16) and they are/were homeschooled until they decided to on their own to change (younger 2 are still being homeschooled). It's a really great option and the people who complain they aren't being "properly socialized" must be the parent of bullies who want more victims for their kids.
My daughter was 15 when she had her first ride on a public school bus. She was a little disturbed by the misbehavior of some of the other students, but she understood that their parents (and teachers) set different standards for them. She has adjusted much better than I ever did (I was in public school from kindergarten on) and is a model student in both grades and extra curricular activities.
There is no question that home schooled kids are "sheltered" from the real world. But I think that's a positive. My kids never learned how to cut down their peers with viscious words or physical violence. They assume that being friendly with people will be to their advantage and they act much more grown up than many adults I work with.
You can write this off as being a "proud father", but I'm very happy my kids were home schooled during the years when it matters most. We geeks understand the pain that can result from "proper socialization" better than most people, and the idea of home schooling is really very logical for us.
Being female, I took a moment to compare your theory to my high school experiences. The thing is, none of it seemed to apply. My crowd had both male and female members; so did every crowd I can recall. In middle school, I caught some nasty abuse, but in high school, I was unaware of any true bullying. It probably existed, but I wasn't aware of it. There were fights in my high school, but they tended to be between girls fighting over some guy (no, really!).
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Just some random thoughts
-monique
A couple things to think about in regard to 'children' in schools and 'bullying'.
Children are
Worse, it's up to the victim's parents whether or not to act... leaving those with the worst homelives the most vulnerable... either to bullying or being bullied.
IMHO, if you can legally require the separation of the bully from the victim, you may have really helped one kid.
I also think the comment in the article that "... while these comments may seem silly to people who have matured, they are very devastating to the young people on the receiving end..." ignores the above reality.
It's tough to draw analogies to adult life, but what if you were legally required to show up for work? What if somebody spread a similarly scandalous rumour about you at work? Oh... let's see... while kids might think it cool to grab a peer's breasts, the reverse might just work for adults. So, your coworker starts telling people that you grabbed her breasts, and you're making passes at her all the time. So your coworkers begin to shun you. You can't quit... you're legally required to be there. You can't call the police, they won't do anything because this is just a little bit of workplace bullying. Now your boss... who happens to be 150% of your height, twice your strength and twice your weight, might just believe the person spreading the scandal, so it will be your word against theirs.
Your friends at work no longer want to be seen with you, because anyone can fall victim to such harassment... so you become ostracised... Some even join in to dispel rumours that they too might be perverts. Few people really believe the rumours, but they know you're not a safe person to be around because you... and anyone you're around is a target.
Seeing that you have no allies, people begin to pick on you, steal your office supplies, scratch your car, slash your tires.
So you keep going to work, despite all this, because you're legally forced to.
Now we're getting close except: kids don't get paid, have little control over their homelife and they've never known anything else.
I was about 16 then, trying in vain to sound like a lawyer. Anyway those kids posted pictures a blurred out scanned picture of me from the yearbook, and posted some false information about me, and went to an online game I played and spread the link.. slight damage was done, but whatever, after I sent that email the site was gone within 24 hours, and they replied saying that had been taken care of.
Then again, if those kids knew how to set up a personal server.... DDoS time.
Please direct all bug reports to
If you're talking about being literally attacked, as in someone attempting to do you grievous bodily harm, then yes I agree. At that point you have no choice. We were talking about bullying, though. Bullying doesn't have to end with that kind of violence.
Bullying often does include violence. Punching. Slapping. Kicking. Even if I lost, any one of those was enough to earn a bully a good fight.
Once, on the school bus, round about 4th grade a bully kept slapping the back of my head. I put up with it for two or three days. I walked to his seat and proceeded to kick him in the face. He beat me in that fight, but he never slapped my head again. That was all I wanted. If I had to lose a fight to get it, fine. To this day, (about 20 years later) he always makes a point to say hello to me.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano