Slashdot Mirror
Classroom Bullies On The Internet
peter303 writes "Oldtimers are familiar with sociopaths in usenet newsgroups and chat rooms. The NY Times has an article about grade school kids who bully on the Internet. These include message bombing and slanderous web pages. The web allows one to extend bad manners from real life."
Granted, things will have probably changed by the time I have a child old enough to be dealing with anything like this (there seems to be a long history of 'geeks' in my family, my father was an electrician, my grandfather was a chemist, etc), but if I were a parent now, here's what I would probably do:
Find the offending username/ip.
Move them off of whatever IM client they're using now.
Put them on something a bit more intelligent, my weapon of choice would be centericq, but anything that will allow you to do some scripting will work.
Set up an auto-reply to that user. Auto-block that user. Heck, grab the IP address, nmap, and script-kiddie a shutdown of that IP. Doesn't matter, but you ARE empowered as a parent to stop this sort of thing.
Granted, not all parents are as geeky as we are. There should be a basic 'block username' and 'block from IP address' function in an IM client, no?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
This reminds me of my early mudding days, you eventually learned there was safety in numbers and banded with other players. I was pkilled and a friend was also harrassed by the same player, but because I told him about the meanie, he was prepared.
My nephew, years later, who was a blue belt in Tae Kwon Do and a reasonably bright lad, met with similar disappointments in Ultima Online. Nothing kills player enthusiasm for a game like pkillers who prey on newbies.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-
According to this article from the BBC bullying also occurs via SMS messages, with 16% of 11 to 19 year-olds admitting receiving threatening text messages.
That's worse than IM harrasment since most phones don't provide an easy way to block an individual sending you SMS messages plus most cellular companies allow you to send an SMS message to one of their subscribers from their website.As this was from October 03 it wouldn't surprise me if this figure had risen
Add in many plans have SMS messages costing you a few cents a message (or only so many free then they charge) and you have a major problem. On the bright side the kids sending the threatening messages will likely be violating several laws, local, state, and federal.
Can you imagine a bully in reform school telling his new peers that he was put in there for sending threatening messages? He'd be labeled a geek/nerd and learn what bullying felt like from the victim's side quickly.
Of course that would be poetic justice. :)
On a related note, kids seem to have really lost all common sense. We had an incident in the county I live in where the upperclassmen football players decided to haze the freshman (hazing is both against school policy and against state law here). How'd they decide to go about this? Oh they filled plastic baseball bats full of sand and beat the freshman with them. Some had to be put in the hospital. Most of the kids won't tell who did it because they're scared of retaliation. The parents are livid and the punishment the offenders received didn't help. They were given ten days of in school suspension and forced to set out half of one game.
Frankly I know that every generation will say things weren't as bad when they were kids but even in high school I (and my peers) were smart enough to know beating someone with a heavy blunt object wasn't a good idea.
> I think it's mostly that people don't have to deal
> with real-world consequences. You can say things
> in text to people that would get your face beaten
> in if you said them in person.
We can learn from this. If you could beat up rude people in real life, there would be a lot fewer of them. Sleazy newspaper reporters, lying used car salesmen, and dishonest politicians will disappear practically overnight if one were to abolish the first amendment for everybody. These days the first amendment is abolished only for honest people who are not allowed to talk about dangerous subjects at work or protest peacefully on the grass in New York
And it doesn't end as you enter adulthood, not if you really look at things. People are the same approval seeking, filthy conformist fuckers from the time their baby brains become fully wired until the day they die. Nothing changes. The only reason most stop pulling bullshit after age 18 is because their asses can be sued or arrested.
Just look at Bush and Kerry, two alleged pinnacles of achievement (presidential candidates). A couple bullies slinging mud and trailing a wake of sycophants behind them. Just like high school. Nothing changes. Nothing matures. The only advancements in civilization are technological improvements and once in a while someone gets and idea that manages to stick (like a Constitution).
--- Ban humanity.
While in highschool back in 1995 a kid was spoofing my account and abusing some root exploits, it was a VT100 console, by that time every computer at the lab had an static IP address that matched a number written on sticker in the screen. Got his IP address, took a look at who was at the computer, and literaly I walk towards him, grabbed him from the neck and kicked his ass out of the lab.
I was prohibited to enter the lab for the rest of the term, but he was kicked out of school.
I have a better answer for the abuse, if it gets bad enough to be affecting your child that strongly. Find out the screen names/IM handles in question. Ask your child to find out who they are in real life. Print out the offending messages on real paper. Mail them to the parents of the children in question. Sure, you'll find some parents who won't care, but the vast majority of people will respond to this by confronting their kids with the evidence. These kids will back off fast when they realize that the stuff they say online can find its way back to mom and dad.
Virg
In one model - there are 4 groups in the *bully/victim* scenario:
1. *Bullies* - who repeatedly make some sort of attack on someone who is (for some reason or another) unable to defend against it (an *asymmetric* relationship).
2. *Passive victims* - who usually don't provoke the bully, they might just be different - or weak - or handicapped - or smart - or not something...
3. *Active Victims* - who tend to be very good at getting under someone's skin - either by the way they say things (perhaps they have a great way to humiliate someone verbally) - but they usually end up seen as the ultimate victim. If you trace things back, active victims look a lot like bullies, but in a different way. They often blame others with a type of rapid revisionist history of events.
4. *Bystanders* - they tend to *normalize* what is accepted in the social setting - so what might be considered bullying by one group, might be considered *normal* by another - which is one reason why you can talk to a teenager all day about not bullying, and they have one view of what that means and sending a *mean IM* probably isn't going to be it, unless that child identifies themselves themselves as the victim.
On a related note - however kids define bullying, more than half say they have been both victims and bullies in different situations, and like all models - the *4 groups* listed above is just a handy way to help some get a handle on the way many situations play out.
There was actually a legal case close to me (Pittsburgh) where an underage girl was arrested and charged with distributing child pornography after posting naked pictures of herself.
I believe the charges were dropped but I'm not certain.
This leads to a while (off topic) ugly serious of questions. Cases like the above were obviously not how child pornography laws were intended. My understanding is that the intention is to protect children from sexual predators exploiting them. How does the inscreasing ability of children to "publish" on their own, combined with earlier sexual activity affect this?
While it's idiotic, I certianly don't think that a 14 y/o should be criminally liable for a picture/video another 14 y/o sends him.
Thoughts?
A little twist here...
I was prohibited to enter the lab for the rest of the term, but he was kicked out of school.
Basically, the kid doing the hacking got no punshment but the violence (you) was dealt with harshly.
I see the same exact thing with my kids in school. My kids get picked on (as do many other kids). Some examples.. some kids forcably took my sons MP3 player from him and would not give it back, eventually they did but the headphones were broke. They took his shoe and pulled the laces out, stuck gum in his hair etc... For a 12 year old, that type of abuse is hard to handle. He refused to get up in the morning, did not want to go to school, claimed he was sick etc.. After numerous attempts of my trying to deal with the situation in a logical and mature manner by dealing with the guidance office abd principal, absolutely nothing had changed. Finally at a conference with the prinicipal and my son, I told my son to get out of his seat from the bus, calmly walk up to the offender and punch the SOB right in the face as hard as he could and if the kid got up, do it again in the stomache or in the nuts by any means possible. I had to resort to barbaric fighting to solve my sons emotional stress. The principal bluntly stated that he was going to put that in his record that I stated that and if anything like that happened, my son would be immediately expelled and charged. Funny how the school can allow and do nothing about any amount of mental abuse but physical abuse is dealt with immediately. I do not really know how they can deal with mental abuse issues but neither did they. After attempting to resolve the situation I finally provided my own a method that I know would work. The confidence he gained from that talk and further talks about the subject allowed him to stand up to the groups of kids without actually having to "fight" it out.
I'm sure many here will never agree to fighting and honestly I do not either but I can tell you the mental abuse a picked on child and their parents have to deal with is 1000x worse then a bully with a bloody nose. It is far better to snap early and use fists then to wait and bottle up the pain until they do something far worse. Too bad the school system does not think that way and could not provide any guidance.
it's happened more than once that someone I recognize cuts me off or drives rudely around me - then they recognize me and their face changes.
Might I direct your attention to the greater Internet Fuckwad theory?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
This was my theory on why driving was so much worse in South Korea (when I was there in 1994) than in the US. Koreans have an extremely strong cultural hierarchy, older being higher, and men above women. In person, the younger (or female) always deferred politely to the older person. But once they get in a car, they automatically assume they have more rank than the next guy, because they can't see his face! and proceed to drive crazily like all others should make way for the King.
Despite all the race/sex problems in America we really do have a cultural expectation of equality. When we come to a 4-way stop, Americans across the country expects to get their turn regardless of race or sex. My two cents, anyway.