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Schools Act to Short-Circuit 'Cyberbullying'
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "So-called cyberbullying is a growing problem for school administrators, the Wall Street Journal reports. What may once have been snickers in the hallway can now be an excruciatingly public humiliation spread via email, text messaging and online teen forums. From the article: '"There's always the legal discussion of 'if it doesn't happen at school, can a district take action?'" says Joe Wehrli, policy-services director for the Oregon School Boards Association. "If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web and they come to school and have to sit in the same classroom with the student that's the bully, there is an effect on education, and in that way, there is a direct link to schools," he argues.'"
Shouldn't they be stopping *real* bullying, where someone gets beat up, before they try to tackle "cyber" bullying?
I mean, it isn't going to work... how do you stop people from talking to each other, and doesn't that raise ethical/censorship concerns? This just means that you don't have to be the biggest guy in school to bully somebody. Get an anonymous email and do it that way, and "we" get our turn bullying...
Seriously, you (a school) can't stop kids from using IM, E-mail, and forums. Only their parents can do that and most really don't care. The government trying to do that (even just for schoolkids) would be a huge step in the wrong direction as far as the first amendment goes.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Its funny, Before it was us Geeks being bullied. now the Geeks in school are bulling everyone else on the web.
Something similar has been happening lately at my university, except during classes and on the university's computer equiptment. Most of the time the idiots doing the bullying use their own accounts and get caught, but we've even had incidents of threats to teachers and such. Now I don't think there is a single machine on campus that you can get onto without having a school account, which locks out parents, alumni, and guests from using any of our technology resources.
The thing that I find somewhat amusing about the whole issue of "cyber-bullying" is that the online world is the traditional playground of geeks. Now those geeks are getting picked on in their playground instead of just the one at school - the difference being that in this playground, the geeks are the bigger, stronger ones. So, you decided to try to mess with me online eh? Lets see how tough you act when your Myspace page is filled with horse porn, and your parents' inbox is filled with spam from the darkest corners of the web, with your name in them. Still acting tough? Whoops, sorry, I guess my finger slipped and I sharded all your purples in WoW. And distributed your gold to everyone in Ironforge (you Alliance pansy). And got you kicked out of your guild. So, stop picking on me at school, and I'll stop destroying you at home and online. Deal?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Anybody who manages to get themselves targetted and bullied online deserves to have their internet user license revoked, their AOL CDs smashed, and forced to take a defensive surfing class taught by Bobo the circus ape.
Here's a thought: How about they handle regular bullying, which happens in the school, before worrying about cyberbullying, which is more out of their hands?
The thing is, at least in my experience, bullies rarely get punishment for their bullying, even when the abused works up the courage to complain to someone. Some schools may have more things to worry about, like fighting, drugs, and gang-wars, but there are plenty that don't. Most of the teachers in these schools turn a blind eye to the problem right in front of them. I've only ever seen one teacher, aside from the school counselar, tell a student to knock it off. Vulgar slurs, personal attacks, and cruel nicknames may seem like something kids are "supposed" to do to each other, but it has longer reaching effects than most adults will admit to.
And, when doled out in large quanitities, can lead to Columbine-like events.
No, I don't have an answer for bullying. I wish I did. When ever a bully is punished for what they do, it's generally a detention, and then they're back dishing out more punishment because you turned them in. Perhaps some sort of humiliation for them, like having to wear a dress for a day, would help them realize what it does, but the parents would complain that their "darling angel" is being unfairly treated, and that would be the end of that.
So if they don't get punished at school, of course they're going to continue at home, because the parents tend to be oblivious to what they are doing. Even worse is that some of those on the receiving end of bullying at school will turn around at home and do cyberbullying. Often they'll target those who attack them at school, other times they'll go after the popular kids, usually anonymously. This gives them a feeling of control and power, the reverse of what they feel at school.
So take care of regular bullying first. Then you'll know how to work against cyberbullying, and in the process probably take care of some of it, too.
Face it, if the schools can censor students' posts to prevent bullying (and censorship is what we're talking about, let's not mince words) then they can use exactly that same principle to censor students' posts on any other subject, including legitimate criticism of teachers and administrators. And as much as hate bullying and wish schools would do more to fight it, if it comes down to a choice between free speech vs. protecting kids from things that happen off campus on the other, I'll choose free speech every time. As I remember vividly from my own high school days, speaking out honestly off-campus about incompetent and/or malicious faculty is about the only chance smart, committed kids have to make a difference in the quality of their education. Bullying can be dealt with one-on-one; when you're up against The Man, you have to have a forum where you can organize.
... damn kids ... grumble natter ... where'd I leave my dentures ...)
(Of course, we did it without all this fancy technology you kids have these days
We'll probably get the worst of both worlds. There will be a lot of noise about protecting the victims of bullying, cyber- and otherwise, but nothing will actually be done in that regard, while new powers of censorship designed to allow schools to track down "cyberbullies" will be swiftly and effectively used to silence students who criticize the school. And anyone who objects too loudly will be tarred with the Harris & Klebold brush, maybe with a touch of bin Laden thrown in. I wish I could believe I was wrong about this, but that's likely the reality.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does anyone else think that when somebody puts up a website called "Kill Kylie Incorporated", it's the person putting up the site who looks like a big fucking idiot?
A lot has changed in the past 20 years with the adoption of pervasive technologies. Yes, e-mail and instant messaging and forums have been around a lot longer. I'm enough of a geek to acknowledge that. What has changed, however, is the adoption and ubiquitousness of the technology.
What hasn't changed, however, are people. People, in the US especially, differentiate themselves from The Other. Be it a "geeky" kid, two guys or two girls kissing in public, people who have (or lack) skin pigmentation, anything. All we're seeing here is a new type of differentiation of "The Other".
To solve the problem requires striking at the root of this all-too-human drive to be xenophobic. The real problem is: How do we (individually or as a society) bridge the divide and create, if not xenophiles, people with an educated understanding and lack of fear or hostility from those that are different from themselves?
Or, put another way, SSDD. Just with cooler technology and different leverage.
Cyber bullying is what the very first person does that results in cyber lynching - and cyber lynching is something we definitely need to get a grip on. And I don't mean just at schools - I mean in general.
Look at how easy and how often cyber lynchings take place on Digg. A single inflamatory article stating one side of a dispute with no 3rd party corroberating evidence or investigative journalism behind it - and someone's getting 200 death threats a day over the phone or tens of thousands of people local to the area are avoiding a single car dealership "because they SO screwed so and so anonymous guy on the web".
The parents aren't in much of a position to see the effect, how often does the cyber bully stand toe to toe to his/her victim in their parents house or yard and heap shit on them? The effect is observable at school.
Yeah, go get the little bastards.
Horse puckey. This is the same "Nanny-State" logic congress uses to meddle in affairs they shouldn't. Control the kids and situation AT school and don't waste school resources (time, money and energy) trying to control what happens outside the classroom.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
If someone is being harassed, why aren't the police involved?
The whole concept of everything that could possibly affect a kid's education being the state's responsibility scares the hell out of me. Yeah, his point about after-hours bullying carrying through to the classroom makes a certain amount of sense, but frankly, I don't care.
We sometimes might eat food that doesn't conform to the district's nutritional guidelines. Is that the school's concern?
My kids get to play video games that the district would never allow. Is that the school's concern?
The rugrats might even play a game of tag in the yard, even though the district doesn't allow it anymore. Is that the school's concern?
No, no, and no. And neither is it the school's concern whether my kids are the source or target of bullying when they are not in school. Stay out of my living room! I am the parent here, not a well-meaning but fascist bureaucrat.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm not sure how things are working in other cultures, but in the U.S. part of our problem is bowing to the overly sensitive.
If we give our kids the tools to handle pressure, and the outlets to deal with it, they will be much healthier adults. Since the 1970's, we've psychoanalized ourselves into a morass or "feelings" and "inner child" excuses. We want to legislate and be protected from things that "offend" us. So, our children grow up, not being able to handle the pressure and they go to the extreme when they snap.
I'm reminded of the line in an Eagles song, "I'd like to find your inner child and kick its little ass." (Get Over It). The term now-a-days is "Man Up". If you went crying to school administration, or you father, they'd tell you to get tough.
If you don't teach kids how to deal with it, how to get angry, but control it, how to defend yourself, but don't start it then we will soon have a nation of people who shouldn't be allowed out of their homes.
I was listening to local talk radio yesterday and the discussion was about a Texas town where the word "nigger" was going to be outlawed. One of the callers couldn't understand why the radio host considered people a little too oversensitive to the word. The caller wanted all hateful words legislated out of usage because it was his right to be protected from them. He told the host that if someone used the word "nigger" on him, he would pull out a gun and shoot him. His inability to deal with the harshness of the world makes him see murder as a proportionate response to a racial slur. He literally said that in order to avoid him shooting someone, government should make a law against the slur so he could take the person to court. (Seattle Dori Monson Show.)
We need to teach kids to deal with it, react appropriately and proportionately and responsibly, and not expect to be protected from things that offend them.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
So the kids are working in the food service industry after school. Does the school have the right to tell them ANYTHING about how they'll behave there?
After all, bullying at work can affect them at school when they have to sit in the same classroom as the person who is bullying them at work.
The school's authority ends when the school day ends and where the school grounds end.
Sure they care about this and want to stop it. Why? Becuase some nerdy bastard could "cyber-bully" the football team hero or the thugged out wannabe gangsta dudes.
Of coure when the most promising students in the school are allowed to be tortured every day no one cares about bullying then! And people wonder why our schools are failing!
But when some scrawny kid could actually turn the tables on the internet suddenly it has to be stopped!
And not one that most people on /. have had experience with. What I find most interesting about it are two things:
1. It's easy to turn off a chat window or go to a different webpage, something you can't do in real life.
2. It's trackable- meaning that if the harrassment becomes bad enough you can easily show authorities what's going on. If someone is threatinging you in a hallway at school, there isn't really any proof you can give the authorities.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I personally did something of the sort about 8 years ago. Although it wasn't really a geek picking on other geeks, but more of calling out "whores" and the rest. I even created a tree diagram depicting everyone who should have STD's.
I hosted it locally on an httpd with a dyndns pointing at it. Within a few days it received a few thousand hits, all from the local school. The school immediately started crying legal action, I merely dropped the site's dyndns, shut down the httpd, and they were never wise enough to trace it. At the same time there were a good 5 or 6 fights at school happening to completely innocent parties. Everyone thought they knew who was to blame, and things went nuckin futts.
I'm sure today the school systems are a little more up to date on technology, and wouldn't posting things on the internet be prosecutable as liable and slander? I don't think the school systems and government should take action, but couldn't the parents of the children file civil cases against the parents of the children making these sites?
Its simple if bullying or harrasment takes place online it should be prosecuted to full extent of the law as harrasment, and as theres no real direct way to prove the user of the pc at the time the bullying took place though its easy to trace the p, the owner of said pc should be charge with the crime and it is a crime. You can bet alot of parents will suddenly get their kids in line if they end up with an harrasment charge and a restraining order.
Kids also comminting crime using a computer should also be tried as adults.
Little harsh but they gotta learn
"If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web and they come to school and have to sit in the same classroom with the student that's the bully, there is an effect on education, and in that way, there is a direct link to schools," he argues.'"
/actually went out in the evening/ and got bullied for hours, and then had to sit in the same classroom with the bully?
How is this different from when kids
Schools are completely failing not only with education, but with controlling students in the classroom as well. IMO, this type of thing is just schools attempting to gain control over something that isn't here domain because they have lost the ability to teach and control students. No-body likes to feel useless, but this is embarrassingly transparent.
'if it doesn't happen at school, can a district take action?'
No. No, it can't.
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web and they come to school and have to sit in the same classroom with the student that's the bully, there is an effect on education, and in that way, there is a direct link to schools
If an auto plant on the other side of town emits heavy metal-containing fumes that impair concentration, there's an effect of education. If Syria invades Jordan, thus making all the Jordanians in the neighborhood stay up late listening to the news, there's an effect on education. If gas prices fall, thus creating extra traffic and possibly interfering with the school commute, there's an effect on education. If a hilarious new comedy sketch becomes meme-of-the-moment so that people spend their time repeating it to each other and giggling, there's an effect on education. If Mrs. Rhonda F. Tedzilliger of 4043 Sycamore Street, Des Moines, farts loudly within hearing of a group of kids who are so grossed out by the experience that they don't eat lunch and become listless in the afternoon, there's an effect on education.
None of this stuff is within the authority of your local school board.
It's the same old pattern whereby any organization, even a benevolent one, gradually claims it has an interest in everything adjacent to its actual job, and then everything adjacent to that, and so on. This is exactly what caused the British Empire and, worse yet, the Federal Government.
ALSO:
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web
he should DO SOMETHING ELSE then. It's not like we're talking about real bullying. Sheesh.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Sorry. Just had a nasty flashback there. Carry on.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
/ignore
:)
Okay, so that wasn't exactly what he told me. But that's how it applies to internet bullies.
Bullies get their jollies by making you look little. They want to feel superior to you. If you just put every account they create on ignore and don't bother reading whatever crap they post online in an attempt to get a rise out of you, they'll get bored and go elsewhere. The problem is that a lot of kids think they have to argue back any time anyone says something about them. They can't shut up long enough to realize they are giving the bully exactly what he wants.
Favorite stunt against a bully: I once told a guy I'd let him hit me three times and if he could knock me down with any of those three punches I'd give him $20. Three hits later I was still standing and he was seriously reconsidering the idea of a fight. He was a wuss and I knew it
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
In some ways, schools parallel the workplace. The workplace is getting more intrusive on what you outside on your own time. Can you say drug testing for example. Also, some companies frown on some risky activities such as motorcycling. The biggest thing is getting fired for bogging even if anonymous and even not mentioning company name.
On one hand, the bullying needs to end but how far can a school go without being intrusive. One idea is the school steps in only if the behavior affects the classroom as mentioned. The connection should be documented just in case of future legal action. Most schools districts have a legal department and that department needs to be utilized just like companies.
I think I mentioned the Columbine shootings a few months back, and someone replied recommending Going Postal - Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond. I read this last night:
Substitute "children" for "slaves" and "compulsory school" for "slavery", and this paragraph perfectly describes why the bullying problem perpetuates itself: "we're" currently incapable of recognizing how the institution itself creates the problem. Gatto describes the government school as "psychopathic"...
Later chapters are on the Columbine and other schoolyard shooters, but I haven't gotten there yet.
(p.s. If you see this, thanks for the book recommendation, Slashdotter, whoever you were...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Nobody realizes that people have the right to bully others. It brings them enjoyment so why should they be infringed upon? Also hazing rituals should be brought back as the social norm.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
I am reading this article in amazement. Do school administrators really think everything began with Myspace??!!! By these laughable cyber harrassment standards, all highschool sports (especially football) should be banned.
You do not have the right not to be offended, and neither do children. In life, there are going to be many people who won't like you, and as such, you have to develop your own inner self independent from the opinions of others.
Now, if an adult hits an adult, he will be tried for assault. Similarly, if a bully attacks a kid or is found physically hurting him, taking his lunch money, etc. I think he should be expelled and sent to a military school, or better, his parents will have to pay the normal fine for assault (around a thousand USD) directly to the kid.
- pay attention in class
- don't run in the corridors
- attend the required lessons
they're teaching children how to behave. If you take your line to it's logical conclusion then teachers shouldn't step in when pupils are fighting because that's teaching them how to behave.90% of what you learn in school is about social skills, or 'how to behave'. Most of it you learn from your peers, but teachers, especially the good ones, will be leading the way.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
First off, I largely agree with you, but I think you neglect that anything, not just physical violence, can be taken too far.
Case in point, my family moved around a lot and I was in several high schools. In one particular such school, I got targeted by a fairly popular individual that started spreading rumors about me being a "faggot". To this day, I have no idea why. Anyway, with his social network, he pretty much destroyed me socially. If I complained to counselors, I was told to "not let it bother me". If I complained to my parents, I was told I was "too sensitive". Every school day, I had to put up with being called "faggot" and, on several evenings, I was getting obscene phone calls from people who really were gay.
The, one day, it happened....I was walking down the hall and heard someone call me "faggot" just one too many times,....and I reflexively punched him in the face. He went sprawling backwards into a door with a surprised look on his face, then ran to a nearby teacher saying that I hit him for "no reason". Soon after that, I'm in a counselors office with my parents being told that, not only am I "too sensitive", but I have an "anger management problem" as well.
It was at this point I realized that, not only am I targeted, but nobody really cares.
A similar incident would happen a few weeks later, only this time it was the guy I knew to have started the rumor. I took a slightly different approach with him. I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. Then, I told him the following, "you want to tell everyone I'm a faggot?, fine!, I'm going to march you in front of your friends and THEN! I'm going to kick your ass!".
At that point, he turned into something more animal than human and started pleading with me to let him go.
Ya know what?....I let him go.
He got about 8-9 feet away, turned around, and begged me to never tell anyone what just happened....and I never did....and he never bothered me again (he didn't go running to a teacher either)....and neither did his friends....even the harassing phone calls stopped....but I never did repair the damage to my social status, at least not until we moved again.
I submit that, if I truly had a problem with self control, I would have crushed that guy when I had the chance. All I really wanted, however, was for him to leave me alone, and I got that.
Sadly, high school students can't really hire lawyers to file slander and libel suits.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
If it's outside school, shouldn't it then be the domain of police and/or lawyers? Libel, defamation and assault come to mind.
Of course, this would require those same parents who sue MySpace for not watching their kids.
Cyber-bullying is all that we have to fight back against the real life bullies!
-- lol pwned
It's your life - if you don't like what's happening to you, either grow a thicker skin or DO something about it ! And no, whining to the nearest "authorities" doesn't count - that's just avoiding the issue. If you are being physically bullied, then the only thing that will stop it happening is fighting back. Bullies only attack people who don't fight back - logic 101. If you are being mentally bullied, then get a life. You will never be able to take the world outside if you feel oppressed by every little hitler who says something nasty to you.
It's called self respect and it's the lack of this vital feeling that is the cause of so many of societies current problems. Without self respect you can never really respect anybody else and so no-one will respect you. Self respect is NOT being a hero in front of your mates, it's NOT acting like you are the best thing going, it IS being sure of yourself and taking responsibility for your own life and actions.
The sad thing is, the more people complain about bullying, and the less they actually do about it themselves, the worse the problem gets for everybody. It results in the government passing laws and regulations which affect everybody, even those who can and do stand up for themselves.
But remember folks, it's not your fault ! </sarcasm >
Here, let me put it in real world terms for you.
A bunch of kids are working at McDonald's after school. Someone craps all over the bathroom. The manager is NOT going to assign the most popular kid to clean it up, is he? He's going to assign the unpopular kid. That's life. And that kid is going to be teased about it the next day at school. That's life.
Now, that kid can either learn the "social skill" of "dealing with it" from the experience or he can declare himself "emotionally devastated" by the "trauma".
No, it is NOT up to the school to "teach them how to behave there". The kids will learn it (if they do learn it) from the other kids and from their family and so forth.
Was a big step forward for this!
Schools are government organizations and if you are a child, the schools rules are forced upon you. A government organization removing people's free speech rights is a horrible idea and quite correctly prohibited by the constitution.
Administrators like to think of the students like stores think of customers... here's how things are, take it or leave it. The problem is, there is no "leave it". Truancy laws say you have to go somewhere and essentially no children have the financial means to chose to go somewhere else.
If you take away a kids right to free speech during school hours you haven't really taken it away, you've just pushed it to non-school hours. This seems reasonable. If you take it away at home, however, you've removed it completely.
Repression of free speech is unconstitutional because it is a stupid idea. Inevitably it leads to the opposite of what it intends. Bad thoughts and ideas fester in private and die when the light of many eyes are shown upon them.
Just because something affects a school doesn't mean school administrators have control over it. They have tons of tools at their disposal, ones that will actually work. Try those. Get creative.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
"Your son should know that lying will get his suspension extended. he keeps saying that you told him to hit the other child"
"Yes, that's correct"
"errrr...hmmm. Never got that one before"
Of course, these days, I would have been expelled, and my mother brought up on "conspiracy to commit assault" charges, while the jackass on the bus that was bullying would have just picked a new target.
there should be a teacher there to protect kids on the playground, but past a certain point, kids need to learn to stand up for themselves. When they get into the world, there will always be people that will attempt to bully them, whether it's their boss trying to get them to work unpaid overtime, or any one of a hundred other things in life. If they spent their childhood running to a hug consoler, they'll never know how to handle it in real life.
Find a copy of this Japanese tv series: Hana Yori Dango. Watch a few episodes of it - there's some real bullying for you.
... is like fighting spam. You can't fight it due to a number of reasons, and most of which involve asshats.
The best approach is to learn to cope with it while it's happening (ie: forbearance) and the pain as the rocket fuel that will make your adult life MORE PLEASANT and REWARDING (mostly because the bullies are all working for you, your organization or some lesser place in society due to karma, which is a bitch).
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"Deter". It's short, to the point, and has a precise and exactly conveys the intended meaning. "Short-circuit" is long, vague, and even given the benefit of the doubt as to its suitability, has a connotation of impeding a positive action.
Also, I'm better than you.
Acy
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
My dad tells me stories of when he was in school, that if you started teasing other kids in class, etc. teachers would bust you in the head with a dictionary. I am pretty sure that would stop just about any bully these days, from the shock value alone. I find it likely that a bully is getting no punishment at home, and I don't advocate physical punishment, but maybe the administration and law enforcement should step up punishment of bullies (hitting is still assault, right?)
stuff |
One of those was the teachers encouraging other students to laugh at you whenever you screwed-up.
Since I screwed-up a lot, I soon developped the ability to not give a rat's ass about what other people think of me, an ability that has served me pretty well in the decades since.
But of course, in a politically-correct ages, busybodies have to have something to do, too, no?
...for bullying to occur?
This statement illustrates the problem. Bullying must be tolerated for it to occur. The best person who can deny a bully permission to bully is the bully, himself. That's called self-control and if the bully had it, this issue wouldn't come up. So what's next?
Schools and parents think they can deny a bully permission to be a bully. They can't. They aren't there when the bad guy acts out. They can punish afterward but they can't do a damn thing to stop the bad behavior while it's actually happening. Like training a dog, if the conditioning isn't presented timely, it's useless.
No, there's only one person who can effectively deny a bully permission to bully: the victim. In real life, legal consequences and PC-nonviolent sensibilities be damned, the only effective way to change the behavior of a bully is for his victim-selection process to fail. When he comes across a "victim" who knocks out his teeth instead of cowering in fear, the bully will stop. (For the moment. He may have to be "conditioned" a few times before he truly learns to think before he acts.)
What amazes me about the quote above is that a victim would remain online for hours, getting bullied, while shutting down the bully is a simple matter of turning off IMs (or whatever channel the bully is using to reach the victim) and going on about ones business.
We don't need to protect victims by trying to defend against bullying. We need to teach victims how to short-circuit the whole process. They are the ones with the strongest legitimate interest in seeing the problem solved. They are the *only* ones who are in the right place at the right time to implement solutions. Hit back. Turn off IMs. Whatever, just stop being a victim.
Emphasis added.
But that isn't what the discussion is about. Nor is it what the article was about.
This is about whether the school has the right to interfere in non-school activities during non-school hours on non-school grounds.
If someone is being bullied at school, that is one thing.
If someone is being laughed at in school because he had to clean up crap at his non-school job during non-school hours on non-school property, that is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS.
1. Two wrongs don't make a right. Being a sociopathic asshole as revenge still makes you a sociopathic asshole. No more, no less. It does not a moral high ground make.
2. Much as I'd like to think you're some uber-l33t haxx0r that hacks right into Blizzard's login servers at the fall of a hat, reality is a lot less glamourous. If there were that easy to hack that, the gold farmer gang would have done it long ago, because they make RL money selling that gold. And frankly, the average high-school nerd isn't half as much of a computer genius as he likes to pretend. He wouldn't even know where to start.
So most actual cyber-bullying is in practice no more of a technical achievement than sending some harrassing emails and IM messages, and subscribing someone's email address to some spam and other crap. It's just the plain old harrassment over another medium, nothing even vaguely resembling some high tech Revenge Of The Nerds.
In the very few cases when a nerd actually gets someone's password, it isn't some great feat of hacking, but plain old being a dishonest asshole. E.g., being told that password and then mis-using it. Makes for some revenge possibilities against an ex-girlfriend, for example, but a great feat of hacking it ain't.
So excuse me if I'm less than impressed. Not that it would excuse being an asshole anyway, but it's not even being that high-tech an asshole.
3. Being kicked when you were an innocent, doesn't give you the right to pick on an innocent too. That's no longer even revenge. And frankly that's what 99% of cyber-bullying is. Some frustrated nobody venting frustration on an innocent third party. I'd like to believe that all cyber-bullying is only justified vengeance, but it ain't. Even your example involves harrassing someone's parents, which is already a third party to your little conflict. Most cases aren't even that targetted.
And even the "revenge" bullying is often for such dubious revenge reasons as being rejected by a girl who, frankly, was perfectly within her rights to make her own choices.
4. Frankly, much as I'm a nerd, I'll say this: if you find yourself that unpopular and targetted, please re-examine your own behaviour first. You'd be surprised how many aren't tormented just because they're smart, or whatever bullshit fairy tale they tell themselves, but because they were the dysfunctional assholes to start with. If you treat people from a "me genius, you idiot" position, they'll start disliking you in return. If you insist on following someone around because you're unable to pick a "leave me alone" hint, don't be surprised if people start treating you worse to give you that hint. Etc.
And no, that doesn't make you the poor innocent victim, nor give you a sacred right to inflict more stress upon the others.
5. Frankly, out of the two, I'll have to say I respect the physical bully more. At least he takes the risks and is prepared to deal with the consequences. I wish I could say the same about the low-lives hiding behing a pseudonym to harrass. At heart both are just the same kind of bully, at heart both would punch your clock just as gladly, except the latter doesn't have the balls to do it in person. It doesn't make a moral high ground. It just moves one from merely being a low-life sadistic idiot to being a _cowardly_ low-life sadistic idiot. It's not a redeeming quality, it's just one more low-life quality to dislike added into an already disgusting mix.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
May the Maths Be with you!
You prove my point: You had the self-control. At some point in your childhood, rather than protect you from the big bad world, you were given the tools, by some sort of role-model, be it parent, relative, friend, sports hero, whomever, and you internalized it. Had you not been given the tools to cope, you may have grabbed a gun and met him in a dark alley, hallway, whereever and exercised your Dylan and Klebold response.
Your response was proportionate and in the fine tradition of all bully responders. You stood up for yourself in a measured and effective manner. Yes, it went against what you had been told, "Johnny mustn't hurt his playmates", and you got into some minor trouble for it, but in the end, you and those around you, learned a valuable lesson, and one that most don't learn now.
In my community, near Tacoma, we have had several incidents that have involved kids bringing guns to school to settle scores. One was deadly. When I grew up, we had the same access to guns. But, we also had tools to cope. I would submit that school psychologists and school pacifist and protection movements have done more to foster extreme violence than help. They may be the ones that are trying to convince us to protect our children.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I was the smallest boy in class, and I have learned that every beggining of the school year it was enough for me to (a) locate the bully, (b) make him want to bully me and (c) give him a nice kick in the balls and (d, ??? ... profit!!!) no one else would look at me wrong again for the whole year. Bullies are, without exception, sissies that would kneel before you if you bully them.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Sheesh...
You can't control what people say without having a chilling effect on all kinds of important freedoms. If you don't think this is true, try this: go down to your local airport and see how comfortable you are around the security screeners just thinking about making a bomb joke.
Let's face it, people are going to say things you don't like. Some of them are going to say things that make you "feel bad." The sooner you realize that and learn to deal with it, the more likley you are to have a happy, productive life. If you're taking what some random group of so-called peers think about you that seriously, you need serious psychological help.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Around age 40 or so there's a spike in contacts with people you haven't thought about since high school. I remember one particular email from a guy who in HS was a midlevel asshole in a group of likeminded young men who devoted their redneck lives to making mine suck. Anyway - flash forward a few decades and apparently these people crawl out of the woodwork, maybe it's part of their 12 step program. Who knows. He wants to be all cheery and shit and ask me to call and that happy nonsense. My response started with "I hope you fucking come home and find your whole family chopped up with power tools and stuffed in garbage bags you worthless piece of shit. I hope you drown in your own children's blood, just send me your address and I'll come by to make it happen." And went on for a few pages after that, closing with, "bone cancer isn't bad enough for for you, so go suck your daddy's cock in hell."
I hope that got the message across - I didn't want him to confuse me with someone who didn't want him burned alive while I laughed hysterically, drinking wine out his wife's severed skull.
BTW I am 100% ok with making credible, anonymous untraceable death threats against the people who torment my kids. If they want terrorism, bring it on. I'm crazier and meaner than all of them.
Turn the fucking computer off after the first 3 MINUTES!
OK fine, that's drastic. How about blocking the offender from your damn IM list? How about deleting emails without reading them? Jeezus, there are SO many options the "victim" can choose. This is NOTHING like being beaten up, or cornered in the bathroom, where you can't escape the situation. Online, the victim has all the power to stop the impact of the "bullying".
The real issue is the bully sitting in the classroom - not what he does on the Web.
In fact, the real issue is the classroom - an authoritarian social setting alternating - like most such situations - between tyranny and anarchy. The classroom ITSELF is an education in bullying and authoritarianism.
The public education system is KNOWN to be the LEAST useful setting for either the learning of knowledge OR the learning of social skills.
Kill the public education system dead. Fire the incompetents who run it and set them to work in the food service and janitorial industries - or perhaps the pest control industry since they seem to spend much of their time worrying about "pests" - where they belong.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It would be nice to see the American education system take a genuine interest in fighting bullying, but any such effort will surely be fircely opposed by those (usually conservatives) who interpret the first amendment (as well as other parts of the US Constitution) as the right to be an asshole. Bullies are what children call their asshole peers. And much like the struggle for civil rights fifty years ago, any effort on the part of the government to rectify the injustices of bullying will be fiercely opposed by a population that sees such despicable behavior as integral to their cultural heritage. It is indeed sad that we in the US live in a country where people who seemingly could care less when rights are taken away for "national security" loudly rattle their sabers when they believe their right to assholery is under attack.
"Words hurt, really hurt..."
Only if you let them. That's the part you and those of you trying to make this point leave out. Yes, children are fragile, but the most important skill one can teach a child is that their self-worth is NOT determined by the opinions of those around them.
You cannot teach a child to not be hurt by getting kicked in the head. You most certainly can teach them that individuals will say unpleasant things which, ultimately, amount to little or nothing.
Or you can take your approach and validate the bully's opinions, giving them the power to hurt you that they otherwise lack.
My appraoch results in a well balanced, well adjusted adult. Yes they were hurt, but they will be equipped to overcome it and grow. Your approach results in a quivering mass of easily influenced neuroses.
In my day, we had to cyberbully through snail mail!
There are a lot of people who do bad stuff just because they can. They need to be stopped. If someone is going around and are just trying to insult people, they will very soon get a very hard time to enter Elfpack anymore.
But it's also very common that people keep arguing with each other in the style "Stop messaging me!" "No, YOU stop messaging me!" "If you don't stop, I'll report you!" "I've already reported you, you idiot!". I respond to those reports with pointing out the fact that they both seem to like to fight as they continue to talk to each other instead of just stop messaging.
Another part of the bully-culture is naive persons who start to speak to someone with "You (some bad word) stop harassing my friend, or bla bla!!!". And in 66% of the cases the original case was built on some sort of misunderstanding and is about to be solved by the friend and "his foe". Their arguments for their right to start to harass someone is of course "But I'm just standing up for my friend!". So then they have to either explain exactly how their bullshit will help the situation in a good way, or face a ban next time they do it. (Guess what happens...)
A much harder problem is people who crack each others' account. No matter how secure you make a website, you aren't safe from people who "borrow" each others' logins when at school. There has been sad events where I had to ban people because they couldn't keep idiots out of their account.
But my general advice is to use a site where people are nice. Why go to MySpace just to read chain messages and insults?
Nice idea, but it didn't work out so well for Harry Houdini.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I also used to particularly enjoy /agree. Nothing quite like the look on a bullys face when you turn around and say: 'Why yes, I am a retarded freak who dresses like 2 year old! Thank you for noticing, I do try!' (helps if you do it with a big smile on your face as well). Completely stumps them every time (not to mention making them look like a fool in front of their friends, which never hurts :).
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Face it, if the schools can censor students' posts to prevent bullying (and censorship is what we're talking about, let's not mince words) then they can use exactly that same principle to censor students' posts on any other subject, including legitimate criticism of teachers and administrators
Firstly, trying to do something about cyber-bullying can in some ways not be censorship because the school does not have to limit a student's ability to express themselves (and in fact they CANNOT legally control the online conduct of a student when outside the school). I figure if a student has the luxury to "express themselves" however they want then the schools should be given latitude to respond at least partly in kind. Is a student harassing or threatening another student and reducing the quality of the learning environment for that student? Well, then the offending student should be able to handle the responsibilities that go with that freedom of expression.
Second, at least in grade school, these students are minors and are not afforded the same rights and freedoms as adults anyways. Thirteen-year-olds cannot legally drive, vote, drink alcohol, posses, distribute or participate in any sort of pornography or be employed in many occupations. These rights and freedoms are granted when society feels a person has become responsible and mature enough. Why do you expect that children should be afforded the full, unrestricted freedom of expression when they are not responsible enough with that right? All this talk about protecting all kids self-esteem at all costs with very adult "freedoms and rights" granted to immature students does nothing more than breed a society of sociopaths.
I figure a period of "supervised custody" would be appropriate (in middle or high school anyways). By that I don't mean in the same sense EXACTLY as prison--I mean that the student must arrive at the school at first bell (whether or not they have to be in a class first thing in the morning) and stay in the building the entire time. When not attending a class (on breaks or at lunch) the student must be supervised by staff and separated from the other students (ie. they must spend all breaks and lunch alone in the principle's office). Also, the student should be banned from unsupervised use of all computers in the school. Such a punishment would surely be more of a deterrent than suspension or expulsion (the latter of which would happen for repeat offenses). After all, many students would see suspension as a vacation, and would be loathe to lose the ability to socialise in school. Furthermore, the offending student can still enjoy unrestricted freedom to express himself (or herself) outside of school, knowing full well that there are consequences for your actions.
if it comes down to a choice between free speech vs. protecting kids from things that happen off campus on the other, I'll choose free speech every time
See, this is the beauty of it--the school doesn't have to censor anyone at all if they took actions as I described above. In fact, it is part of a child's education to learn that there are responsibilities and consequences for every right and freedom we have. If the student wishes to continue enjoying their "freedom to slander" they can go right on doing so--if they can live with the consequences at school.
As I remember vividly from my own high school days, speaking out honestly off-campus about incompetent and/or malicious faculty is about the only chance smart, committed kids have to make a difference in the quality of their education.
RIGHT ON. I believe that as well--the best way that bullying and other issues hampering the effectiveness of education can be addressed is by COMMUNICATING. In the above case I'd fully expect the parents of both offenders and victims to be fully informed and involved in the process. In the situation you mention "speaking out honestly" is not slander or harassment, and if your grades or your treatment are negatively affected b
Why would he be working at McDonalds?
I'm going to take the question seriously because I believe it has some merit. No, indiscriminate death-dealing isn't a reasonable answer. However, I wonder if that extreme case tends to support my position in the long term. In the short term, it certainly did. We saw on the news for sometime after how people were willing to talk about bullying issues and how there was some attempt to reach out to those who were different. (Maybe just out of fear, yes, but at least some talking did happen.)
Long term, though, I wonder if there is now more or less bullying at Columbine. Anybody know of any published sources of info on that? My guess is that the culture at Columbine is probably less accepting of bullying than was the case pre-slaughter. I'd love to know if I'm guessing right or wrong.
(Score: -1, Jerk)
And by the way, "Anonymous Coward" has never been more appropriate. I was lucky enough to go to a school where I don't remember ever seeing ANYONE get bullied, but that doesn't mean I don't believe the problem exists. Of course this is of course the kind of replies parent was aiming for, so sorry for feeding the troll.
(about bullying)
1. never do anything you think is embarassing.
2. never bully anyone because punishment at home will be harsh.
3. talk to me immediately if anyone bullies you.
3a. I will go with a formal complaint to the school administration;
3b. I will authorize you to use full force against the bully, and I will communicate both the school administration and the bully's parents that I have done so -- before you have to.
3c. By full force I mean hit him with a rock or in the nuts.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
They aren't just talking about something you can ignore with the click of a button.
The specific example they used was that someone created a website and the link got passed around to the entire school .
"Kylie Kenney heard a crescendo of whispers and jeers as she moved through an otherwise unremarkable eighth-grade school day. The reason: Word had spread of a Web site posted by some of her peers, titled "Kill Kylie Incorporated."
The site featured a list of crude insults, beneath the heading: "She's queer because...
Even if she didn't read it, the bullies won because everyone else did.
How doesn't it interfere with that girl's education?
How does she "ignore" it?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I never got bullied. For a long time, I thought this was because I was just lucky. I also didn't notice that all my friends seemed to be geeks who were a lot shorter and less athletic than me.
About a year ago, I mentioned this to my wife and she said "Nobody beat you up because you were bigger than them and they were afraid of you. And all your friends were scrawny geeks because if they were your friend they wouldn't get beaten up by other people."
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
1. Tune them out
A. Don't bring your mobile phone/pager/blackberry to school, so you aren't checking IMs at school.
B. Don't post a MySpace site, or totally ignore other MySpace sites that are critical of you.
C. Set up blocks in your IM and e-mail so you don't get messages/mail from people who harass you.
2. Tell them to fuck off
A. If you have friends who keep telling you stuff like "do you know what so-and-so is saying about you?" and "did you see what they posted about you", you tell them "I don't give a fuck about what so-and-so says or posts, they're nothing but a sad loser."
3. Realize that once you get out of high school, no one gives a damn about high school. It is so not important. No one wears the letter jacket or the school ring beyond about the summer after they graduate. The opinions of those high school kids are less than worthless. Those people do not matter at all.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I was bullied quite a lot during my childhood and for the administrators to worry so much about cyberbullying is just stretching it.
I honestly need to say that they need to get rid of bullying in the physical and verbal sense before even attempting to touch the digital sense of it.
In the end, if you are being bullied online, what's the best action you can take so that they will stop?
Disconnect. (or block, if via IM)
Problem solved.
To extend your metaphor, there are two ways to stop a pressure cooker from exploding. One is to let off the steam in a positive way. Talking it out with someone you trust is one way. Exercise is another. Martial arts as therapy has been known to have amazing transformative effects on people.
The other way is to cut off the heat coming into the pressure cooker. A victim can insulate himself from the heat by simply not letting it get to him. Admittedly, that requires more maturity, both emotional and spiritual, than most teens have. Religious devotion can accomplish this. Meditation can, too. I accomplish my meditation via pistol shooting, a wonderfully calming activity that I'd recommend for nearly any troubled teen. Other ways to cut the heat are more external. By striking back, the bully can be convinced to stop applying heat. Sometimes, the authorities (school, police, etc.) can turn down the heat by separating the bully and victim or by punishing the bully.
Both the preceeding paragraphs are intended to answer your question about how to stand up for yourself without going overboard. The physical activity helps relieve pressure and builds confidence so that standing up for yourself becomes easier. The spiritual pursuits help relieve pressure and make standing up for yourself a less fearsome thought.
Overall, though, I think the whole "how to stop the pressure cooker" thing is overrated. Go ahead and let the cooker blow, in a relatively small way, early, before the stored energy is dangerously immense. Just make sure that the explosion is focused against the bully and no one else.
Many have noted that school is - in large part - social education. In younger grades I got picked on because I gave good reaction; come high school I just wasn't fun to tease any longer.
My daughter's elementary school has a well-intentioned, much propagandized anti-bullying campaign; it does half the job by making kids aware of the phenomenon. What it doesn't do is handle the most important side, teaching my kid that bullying is a sign of weakness in the other party; I teach her that.
School is a mere reflection of social pecking order that these kids will see all thorough their lives. If they do not learn to cope with it there, when will they? You cannot stop social viciousness, it is built into us. What you can do is teach kids how best to respond when it happens.
Wrong. Feel free to go educate yourself about it.
Or just continue looking ignorant. I don't care.
Yes, I may be working under assumptions that don't apply. However, I maintain that the only bullying that really matters is direct. The rest of it can either be turned off or ignored.
I realize I'm betraying my age by saying this, but who said that putting yourself into and maintaining a presence in cyberbullying arenas is mandatory behavior? IMs to MySpace to whatever - it's all optional. Why do a certain minority of kids insist on going places they don't have to go when doing so only brings them pain? I don't get it. Then again, I'm old enough to view a cell phone as a painful technology to be used only when absolutely necessary and otherwise turned off and ignored. I have a feeling that kids these days are a little too connected to accept that notion.
As to the different, female mode of bullying - I can only say that I'm old enough to have finally accepted that I'll never understand women. I don't even want to go there.
I wish I could moderate. That's pretty insightful. Yes, kids model the behavior of adults and bullying teachers feature prominently in some of the most vibrant and horrifying memories of my youth.
Your posts contain an awful lot of whining for someone who feels that it's amusing to beat people up and that people who are subject to physical violence should just "suck it up".
You can ignore what they say while you cannot ignore physical violence. They should crack hard on actual bullying before tackling this one.
\u262D = \u5350
/ignore
Okay, so that wasn't exactly what he told me. But that's how it applies to internet bullies.
We've learned it as "Don't feed the trolls." Filtering and the CTRL-D key also helps.
The only problem between online trolls and flamers and cyberbullies is that cyberbullies know you and your physical environment.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
If someone is "cyberbullying" you through IM, then close your IM window, and open a new account with a different screen name you share only with trusted friends. If they abuse that trust and share the name with someone malicious, then change it again and don't share the name with that friend.
If they are bullying you through e-mail, get a new e-mail account, and share the address only with trusted friends/family. I personally have changed my address at least three times when spam was becoming a problem. If changing it is inconvenient, create an e-mail account just for school friends, and a separate one for more important correspondence for which it would be more difficult to change the address. Change your school address as necessary when/if cyberbullying becomes a problem.
Bullied via the web? Stop visiting the web pages where the offending content is posted.
Bullied via hackers? Keep you machine patched and behind a firewall. You should be doing this anyway!
In all cases, the victims must leave open some kind of portal for the bullies to get in. Why can't the victim simply close the portal? I don't see why this is an issue that school administrators need to get involved it at all. Perhaps the school should hand out some advice to students like that shown above. It would seem to me the problem could be ended simply and painlessly with no erosion of First Amendment rights at all.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
So when it was the big, dumb kids tormenting the quiet geek on the playground, in the locker room, in the hallways...nobody cared. Some lip service was paid but no one ever really got in trouble, no one cared, and administrators would wring their hands and go "Well, we didn't see it happening, so..."
But now the quiet geeks are the tormentors, on their own turf. And that's when the schools start caring and blithering about how something must be done. Astounding.
In high school some idiot senior football player had a beef with me -- I don't even remember what anymore. Something he basically made up. Tough guy that he was, he confronted my girlfriend in the hallway between classes, screaming in her face about how he was gonna mess me up. When I found her she was in tears.
Brought this to the attention of the principal, who cared for little other than the football team. His response was to make typical polite noises until we went away. A few hours later the kid approaches me in the lunchroom, ready to end my life, and probably would have if my much larger friend hadn't stepped in to tell him to piss off.
The ruckus was noticed by a science teacher who came over to ask what was going on. Dumb jock shoves the teacher, who hauls his ass down to the principal. The punishment? Sent home for the day. Oooh.
On his way out the kid kicked a huge dent in the side of my car. I noticed at the end of the day when I was leaving. (The moron kicked it in the side of the trunk compartment, though, so all I had to do was reach into the trunk and pop it back out from that side.)
The school did nothing about the vandalism to my car, the threats towards me or my girlfriend, and it was only when he put his hands on a teacher that anything was done -- and then, a slap on the wrist.
But everyone can now rest assured that had I blogged about what a douchebag the guy was, I would have been put in my place as a cyber bully.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
I tell my kid that he does not have authorization to get physical with other boys in school.
BUT, I also tell him that if anyone bullies him, he tells me and I will log a complaint with the school administration, and I will warn the school, the bully, the bully's parents that I have authorized my kid to get physical to defend himself. And that an assault will be police matter next time.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Your shoes look like the queen mommas ears!
I heard you were recently knighted! Congratulations Sir Wanksalot!
Your momma so fat...when she hauls ass...she need to make TWO TRIPS!
Schools could easily stop bullying but they would need to not be wimps about it and be willing to dole out serious punishments, which in todays, PC touchy-feely environment they may not be willing to do.
The key to stopping the bullying is segregating and isolating the bully. Bullying is almost always reinforced by the school age onlookers who laugh or otherwise provide encouragement (passive or active) to the bully. On his own in a controlled environment with no audience, the bully is powerless.
Having a bullying investigation and due process system which involved manditory parental involvement and police contact where any physical violence was threatened or actually happened is critical, too. This mitigates false charges but also creates an environment where its hard to escape the process for bullies, as well as making retribution on the victims more difficult and costly.
It's also very desirable to (coercively, if necessary) involve witnesses to bullying (along with their parents). Most parents would be understandably upset at their kids if they stood by and laughed or otherwise encouraged a bully. If students and parents began to understand that any behavior NOT involving stopping bullying or reporting it was basically participating IN bullying (and had consequences of its own), then it would undermine the audience support bullies get.
It's also critical that bullies and their parents understand that if substantive evidence exists that their child was and continues to be a bully that they WILL be EXPELLED PERMAMENTLY from the school district. All but the worst parents want that, since it usually involves an enormous sacrifice from the parents to get their kid into another school ($$$ for private schools or major transportation hassles).
Unfortunately, doing this is time-consuming and expensive for districts as well as exposing them to (generally unjustified) civil lawsuits from parents who can't believe their angel is an asshole. And schools, administrators and teachers are just too soft, and in many urban districts racial politics raises its head as well (can't quite be expelling a bunch of blacks or latinos...).
I generally encourage my kids to keep their heads down and avoid bullies if possible, but I also tell them that if they are bullied in a way thats at all physical, they have my complete support if they need to physically fight the bully (without weapons, of course) and should they feel they are a victim or are threatened with weapons, I'm perfectly willing to make the principal's life a living hell until the situation is resolved and the bullying stops. Usually a few phone calls from a lawyer to the principal and the school district has remarkable effects, especially if it involves someone everyone "knows" is a bully.
Isn't hitting someone still assault?
Not when children do it. Which is why bullying exists in the first place.
WHY we tolerate it is beyond me, but I'm sure many folks will reply with "suck it up, wimp".
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Apparently Kid A and Kid B set up some myspace page for Kid C with his picture and claiming to be homosexual. Now obviously Kid C begins getting a lot of flack from his 'fellow' students.
What happened? Kid A and Kid B had a visit from an officer of the local police.
As far as I've heard, problem solved.
I think this is more what schools are talking about attempting to curb, moreso than Joe Asshole messaging someone with "hi homo lolololz, r u rly gay" which is easily avoided.
The incident reminds of the penny-arcade comic http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 .
I was accused of having a hit list by some of my classmates, because in my (I think it was) DeadJournal I stated that I'd be just as happy without anyone I knew around me all the time. That was a lovely year, you might imagine.
We know the answer to those problems but it wont be acknowledge.
Pass a law that prohibits phones in schools and well what the hell, pass a law that it's illegal for someone under the age of 16 to have one. Damn we didnt have those in the past and kids DONT need that as well.
Give back some powers to teachers to expell kids, send a clear message to stupid parents that think that their kids are safer with a phone, yeah sure a phone will stop someone from raping/killing you DEUH!!!!
Education must start at home and parent must be held responsible for that, i'm pretty sure the 13 year old didnt buy that phone by himself.
Same thing goes for Parents that leave their kids all alone on their computers with a webcam on chatting and no supervision, shit get real, they may knwo how to use the god damn things but that doesnt make them responsile or even more knowledgeable in the product.
I can drive a car pretty well but that doesnt mean i can fix it.
TAKE CONTROL PARENTS, IT STARTS WITH YOU
I went to a school with a wide diversity of income levels, I was on the higher end of the spectrum of the school. I was also a relatively calm person. This made me a target, because this "bullies" would try and push me to my breaking point. They couldn't break me, and if they some how managed they were physically outmatched by me, and would have ended up on the floor unconscious and bleeding. There were obvious times were I just wanted to turn around get up and beat the shit out of them, but thinking about going to jail was on the forefront of my mind. Besides, it didn't matter to me in the long run, I share no emotional scars from this, but I occasionally thought about how cool it would have been to embarrass those people. Those people are currently sitting in jail anyway on drug charges, looks like I won out.
I don't deny that really bulling happens in school because it does. Do I believe that school's can effectively deal with it? No. The victims know this, that's why incidents often go unreported. Because they know a) nothing will change or b) it will get worse.
...much less monitor the entirety of internet for posting such as "x is a ho".
As a side note, "(Insert name here) sux" and other similar postings on myspace aren't bullying. If you don't want to see what's on myspace, don't go to it. It's an online community, and because of their anonymity, online communities can not be expected to conform to the same standards as a real community. You always have the option of just not caring what you see on myspace. I know I don't. If you want an account of what bullying is, I'll give you one.
My final year in middle school consisted mainly of me being called various insults to which I quickly developed an immunity, telling myself while they were carving their names and jersey numbers into the desk that they would be stuck working at Wal-Mart until they were age forty and suffered some kind of fatal heart problem from overworking. Once it entered the physical realm, however, and I started to miss school due to hospitalization, I had to protest. Since I had been told that I was various forms of 'gay', I briefly considered to use the zero tolerance policy to my advantage, knowing full well that it would only mean anything to them if I actually was gay, but I decided to keep that card in my hand until later, since I still had a little bit of a reputation, even if it was just with the other people who I played Warhammer with.
The principal, who was a woman, did absolutely nothing other than send one of the main offenders home for a week. I'm sure that was an incredibly effective punishment, sending him home where he had 9 hours to freely masturbate and look at porn with no family home. Nonetheless, the first day back, I was again beaten up, and told that I should leave the school "before something happened to me." At that point, I was genuinely scared, and started appealing to the superintendent, the administrative district, and eventually, with the help of my parents. Not one of them did anything...all of these people where star figures in various sports. I had to complete the rest of that year being homeschooled, which didn't look particularly good on an application to a private, selective high school. Thankfully, I was able to get out of there.
Guns tamed the wild west, and they can do the same for schools. Let's reissue the "Peacemaker" as the "BullyKiller".
(This content is best consumed with a glass of water and a healthy sense of humour).
It is the weak who are cruel.
Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
I wish I had mod points. Sometimes a comparison to Hitler or Nazi's is actually a legitimate comparison.
Actually I've often thought it would be an interesting social experiment to give every student in a boarding school a one-shot Taser. One of those compressed-air things that you can only use once. I think the results would be fairly interesting.
By making them one-shots, you have a motivation to conserve it, and not use it frivolously, because then you're left defenseless. But you can't mess too much with other people, because eventually they'll decide it's worth using their one shot on you, and turn you into a twitching mass on the floor, writhing in your own urine and feces.
You'd have to have some sort of a safeguard to keep people from stealing others' weapons, because that could unbalance everything, but I think you'd pretty quickly end up with a very polite campus.
It's sort of like those proposals to end aircraft hijacking by giving everyone a hand grenade, or a single-shot pistol: by giving everyone the power to suppress undesirable behavior, you distribute authority among the group, rather than concentrating it in a small number of individuals, as is normally done.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Frankly, "cyberbullying" should not be a problem. At school, bullies can be hard to avoid. You see them in classes, you might see them after school. Sometimes they're unavoidable, sometimes you can try to avoid them but might run into them anyway. Online bullying isn't at all the same. Online, you're in control of your environment. Set the bullies to ignore, don't reply to them if they try to communicate with you. Also, people need to realize that Myspace is not essential. I've gotten along for years without one. You can always check other peoples' without making your own (I think), and, frankly, if you're being bullied, it might be prudent not to share a bunch of information about yourself where anyone can read it.
I'm not saying that these cyber-bullies are somehow less bad than regular bullies. I'm just saying that they should be much easier to avoid. Just tell the bullied kids how to do so, and that should take care of most of the problem. Also, this stuff is really not the schools' concern. It's outside of school hours and off of school property. It's terrible, yes, but schools shouldn't be expected to monitor their students' behavior every hour of the day.
That's not bullying, that's gossip and libel. There's a difference. In that particular case, the girl's best recourse is still to ignore it. Laugh it off and mock the people who started it. In junior high, a group of guys started a rumor about a gay encounter between me and my brother. It got all over school and people who didn't even know me had heard I was an incestuous fag. Whenever the rumor came my way I just laughed, asked if they still believed in the Easter Bunny too, and went about my business. It lingered among those who didn't like me for a while, but I never really cared. Maybe if we spent a little less time teaching our kids that everyone else's opinions are so important they'd be able to cope with a few lies being told about them.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I wish there were more support, especially as my sons get older. I guess we have to do it ourselves.
The stigma and disbelief are strange. Nobody seems able to believe or even imagine that I was badly bullied. If I ever mention it (which I rarely do) it's to a good friend, and in a joking context, because nobody seems to know what to do with it. They either don't believe or won't admit that things could be that bad. Some friends have told me of their own experiences, and that's really the best they can do.
I wish survivors was too extreme. It isn't. My father's baby sister was killed at the age of three by older playmates. It was an accident, not that they hit her in the head with a rock, but that she died. I took on their fear, which was no help for me with bullying. I'm still terrified of physical violence, but fortunately, as an adult, I'm able to avoid it.
For those of you who are or were bullied, as bad as it is, there is hope. It is essential that you know that the bullying really won't last forever. Even if other people don't believe you, as you become an adult, you can take control of almost all of these things. You can learn to pretend to be extraverted when you need to, to find good people with similar experiences, and to realize that you aren't in school anymore, and those sadists can't hurt you anymore.
Ultimately, I don't know what really changed everything, either the beginning or the end, but I went from being a well-liked kid with a girlfriend in first grade, to the bottom of the food chain, finally to a place apart in high school where I finally got socialized to my peers.
Through most of school, I was really at the bottom of the food chain, where the other victims won't associate with you lest you imperil their tenuous hopes of status, or even pick on you to improve their own. Some of the teachers even despised me. One teacher told the whole class that it was my fault that I'd been literally tied up by my peers and was late back from recess. He liked to point out to the class that I was asking for trouble. I take little solace that he was eventually fired for throwing a chair at a student.
I was lucky. Things changed in high school. I started over in a new town, in a magnet school where there were people even stranger than me. I started hanging out with a lot of them and playing with swords and fencing at school. I also tried to figure out how not to act like a victim. At the same time, I hit 6' tall. I wish I knew exactly what made the difference, but I only know that things got better. There were still the normal conflicts one encounters, plenty of situations to be avoided, and no shortage of pain, but I had friends, and I wasn't beaten up anymore.
I'm more than fine now, with a healthy earned contempt for popular opinion. Since I just might be in a position to offer some support to someone else, I'll resist the temptation to post this as AC.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Let's start arming kids -- as soon as they start kindergarten, they receive a revolver and are trained to use it. Presto -- bullying and child abuse are a thing of the past.
You know that teasing and bullying aren't the same thing, right? In much the same way that spanking your child is different than beating him with a lead pipe, or that flirting with the cute girl at the office is different than dragging her into the forest and raping her.
I'd be surprised if you'd say this if we were talking about adults abusing children, or husbands abusing wives. Abuse is abuse -- it doesn't matter whether it's adults mistreating each other at work, playground bullies, or mommy coming home drunk and beating her son with leather belt for an hour every night. It has exactly the same affect, and the victim is just as deserving of protection and support. This is particularly true for children, who generally lack any means whatsoever of defending themselves.
Incidentally, do you know what happens if you ignore the people making fun of you in elementary school? They up the stakes -- spitting in your hair, destroying your belongings, physical assaults after school, framing you for vandalism ... I'm guessing that you were never really picked on. You can always spot the guy that wasn't picked on, because he thinks the "we all had it just as bad". Unless you were terrified of leaving your house and contemplating suicide because on non-stop harassment, you don't know shit. You're just as stupid and clueless as people that say that an abused wife should "just leave" -- with her two children, numerous injuries, and no income, in a society that despises single mothers above all other forms of life ... THAT'LL work.
People like you are why bullying still exists. This kind of stubborn refusal to accept that there is a problem, just because YOU didn't experience it personally, is ultimately at the root of most social injustices that exist in western society. People who have never had a mental illness think that depression is just "the blues", and people should just "get over it". People who haven't suffered a severe trauma usually think that post-traumatic-stress-disorder is just "nerves". And people who have never been bullied think that bullying is the same thing as the friendly teasing that everyone experiences. Sorry, it just ain't the case.
Seriously man, fuck you. I can't even imagine the kind of mentality that goes into such sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others.
I grew up a little too early in the 90s to be subject to cyber-bulling, but I was a victim of bullying for 13 miserable years. Trust me, it doesn't just fade. We can deny it all we want, try to be as manly as we want, but if you've ever endured more than a few episodes of bullying, you know how horrible it can be and how much the effects still linger under the surface. Even as an adult, I have trouble socializing because I go into every situation with new people expecting rejection, because that's all I got in school. It's bad enough when 800 students at a high school, middle school, or worse yet, elementary school where recess allows more physical interaction know how much of a target you can be. If the entire Internet community and news-watching audience knows because of MySpace or Youtube, I can see suicide being viable. Bullying isn't a joke, it's not merely a fact of life. It's a horribly destructive, mentally anguishing scenario that seems to have no escape. What's worse is when you've had enough and you retaliate. I only retaliated four or five times that I can remember, when I had truly had enough and snapped. Luckily I didn't break out the AK-47 (someone else in my district did in 1997, though, if you remember Heath High School). I only usually punched the guy once or twice, or in one instance all I did was scream "I'm going to kill you." In every instance I got an enormous punishment, much greater than the bully did. For example, the bully got detention one day, and I got alternative school for twenty days. In my school, if you defended yourself you were a goner. Not because the bully would royally pound you--because the school system would. Especially after the school shooting, they were zero-tolerance. The victim always gets the maximum punishment, the bully the minimum. It's a sad, sick fact of school administration. As far as school authority, in our district the school had "authority from when you entered the school bus until you entered the door of your house." This meant that if you got into a fight in your own yard, and the bus driver saw it, you were in trouble at school. Happened to me too! Some bully followed me home on my bike and started talking down to me, so I rushed him. The bus driver saw it and reported me. I can see how schools would have authority over this sort of thing--and it's no different than a workplace being able to fire you for off-work postings to the Internet that are related to work. What the child does online, if it involves the school in any way--then the school has some degree of authority.
Actually, I'd say that teachers do things like stop children from fighting and running in the halls and screaming during class because it creates a chaotic atmosphere where it is very difficult to coordinate the actions of 20+ people so that they learn a damn thing and can concentrate. A chaotic atmosphere also makes it more difficult to get everyone to safety in an emergency.
I'm a public librarian. I don't have the moral authority to teach my patrons how to act, but I do still set and enforce standards of behavior in the library so that the majority of the patrons can concentrate on their work and that when emergencies occur (like during a fire alarm), they know to quietly and calmly grab their items and go where I tell them. It's not a matter of my raising them. It's a matter of providing the appropriate atmosphere.
As to applying this to cyberbullying, that's difficult to do if it isn't happening on school grounds or at school functions. While schools may be able to counsel students, I'm not sure they can penalize them (or taht it would be appropriate to do so) for their actions outside of school. They can, however, make the appropriate authorities (parents or police, depending on the situation) aware of what is going on, and any areas where the bullying touches the school should be dealt with.
Here, let me put it in real world terms for you.
Your "real world" is what you, and people like you, have created.
It's true that the examples you give reflect a common way of things, but none of what you exemplify is a matter of "this is how it will always be", the only way it can be, etc. In fact, to the degree to which things are as you illustrate is, in large part, in my opinion, precisely because so many people have chosen to lower their standards, to give up caring and to shut down their compassion. This sort of thing is okay with you because your heart is withered.
A bunch of kids are working at McDonald's after school. Someone craps all over the bathroom. The manager is NOT going to assign the most popular kid to clean it up, is he? He's going to assign the unpopular kid. That's life.
Maybe if the manager is, himself, a shitheaded twit who plays schoolyard games at work, yes, it would happen that way. But, even McDonald's has a few human beings employed in managerial roles would have some more rational system of rotating duties, not playing out immature social games.
And that kid is going to be teased about it the next day at school. That's life.
It's my opinion is that the biggest reason that a kid gets teased about such things is that we all realize, subconsciously, that if we were to tell the bullyfuck to knock it off, that he will simply turn his ugliness on the us. Since no one wants that attention, it's safer to keep quiet.
The secret is the bully is the one in danger. He's outnumbered 10 to 1 or better. If one person stood up to him, and then another behind that guy, and three more behind him, and so on, things would change fast. But, people are afraid and that gives the asshole coward the power.
Now, that kid can either learn the "social skill" of "dealing with it" from the experience or he can declare himself "emotionally devastated" by the "trauma".
It's true that a few rare people have made too much out of what would otherwise be something less than a trauma, but mocking those who suffer, in ways your dead soul can't appreciate, just makes you less human. 'Dealing with it' is not a way to a happy life. It's a desparate survival tactic - made necessary by people who themselves were hurt and they are now lashing out at others.
The real sadness is how it seems that most people are too far gone, the scars over their heart formed so long ago, that they really can't imagine why it should be different. They split their psyche and left the tender part to die alone a long time ago.
In Nature, stupidity is a capital offense. In human society, too many get off with less than a warning.
http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Say-Play/dp/0674965 906
I skipped through most of the storytelling segments but the underlying message and treatment sound good to me. The author proposes that children be taught from kindergarten up that they can't exclude playmates from games while at school. Sort of an extension of the "don't bring cake unless you have enough for everyone" rule. She finds that if children are not allowed to form cliques, you don't get kids being pushed to the bottom of the pecking order by 2nd grade and staying there for the next decade. I remember how some kids in my school were untouchables at the age of 6-- now it breaks my heart to think of it.
As a parent of a preschooler, the bullying issue concerns me. My son's a pretty sturdy little guy, and we'll teach him to not mind rough teasing, but I refuse to let him bully or be bullied. I'd rather see him suspended than not hit back if he's physically hit. I want him to recognize when another kid is not comfortable with teasing. I'll expect him to step in and defend the powerless, and include them in his games. And, I'll make sure he knows my expectations.
Though I was generally able to take care of myself, I was bullied in middle school, during a vulnerable time after coming back from a semester in another country. Actually it occurred because a teacher, who clearly disliked me but in the absence of nothing else to criticize, picked on me for not speaking loudly enough from my seat in the back of the room. After she singled me out, the classroom bullies realized that I was fair game. Because I'm a polite person, I refrained from answering back for months, but finally I made some comments that questioned their motives and underlined how pathetic they were being... Then somehow many of my classmates, who must have felt uncomfortable throughout the bullying, came out on my side and it stopped. But I have never forgotten the feeling of dread and helplessness, to be surrounded by hostile enemies and indifferent bystanders.
Good luck to all of you who were scarred by this unacceptable behavior... know that many more people may understand your experience than you think.
I grew up in Friendswood, Texas and attended public school, K-12, there. I was bullied relentlessly pretty much the entire time, mostly by the same people.
There were many bullies -- probably on the order of 40 or so, but two were especially awful: Jesse Kellum (a reverend's son) and Monier Khalil (a football player). These two bullied me all the way from about 3rd grade through about my junior year of high school, and they did things ranging from stealing my stuff to kicking me in the nuts to punching me in the face (and breaking my glasses) to lighting my hair on fire. These were two of the most rotten human beings I've ever known -- pure evil, no redeeming qualities or goodness in their hearts whatsoever.
No amount of reporting them to teachers, principals, bus drivers, superintendants, or anyone else made a lick of difference. My parents and I were always told that the district couldn't take any action if school staff didn't witness the bad behavior first-hand. Of course no staff ever witnessed it, because bullies only bully when authority figures aren't looking! My dad told me to "stick up for myself" and "punch them in the face", but I knew that would only make things worse: I would get punished by the school, and it would just piss off the bullies and their bully friends even more and they would come at me worse than ever the next day.
The bullying itself isn't the worst part. It's the frustration and helplessness. Literally NO ONE wants to help you, will help you, or can help you, and if you defend yourself, you (not the bully) get punished! It's one of the most unfair situations in the world, and it really does drive a person to truly want to kill people to set things right.
I used to daydream about somehow obtaining a gun and shooting Jesse or Monier. I thought about shooting the teachers and bus driver and principal, too, since they knew damn well that I was being bullied but wouldn't do anything about it like they were supposed to. Of course I never would shoot anyone, because my parents never kept guns and I had no idea how to get one or use one and I would go to prison. But I thought about it a lot and played it out in my head very graphically. I thought about their lifeless bodies, with shocked looks on their bloody faces, collapsing to the floor, and the fantasy gave me some small measure of relief. If my parents had been gun owners and kept guns around the house, I think there's a very real possibility I would have shot a lot of those fuckers right between the eyes like they all deserved.
Fortunately, Jesse ended up shooting himself, and Monier went to prison for murdering a homosexual behind a bar, and many of the other bullies in my life came to other deserving ends, so it all eventually settled itself out. Mostly.
Today I'm an extreme introvert, because I constantly anticipate that everyone I meet is going to be mean to me. I have a fierce temper when it comes to inequality or other people not being accountable to their responsibilities. I empathize very strongly with anyone who is in any way a victim of any kind, which gives rise to most of my political views (I'm way left on the political spectrum because I think it's the government's job to protect people from being wronged). None of this is a conscious thing or something I can control or change. It is my personality, based on social conditioning I received over a course of nearly two decades.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
"be nice to nerds, you'll probably end up working for one" :)
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
Give me your lunchmoney. You may transfer it to my Paypal account.
Telling someone to "toughen up" or "learn to fight back" is often a waste. It was back then, and it is now. People have to actually LEARN to do it themselves, telling them is no good.
:).
That being said: you can toughen up, learn to fight, whatever. But what do you do when you kick the bully's ass, and he comes back later with ten of his assclown mates? For some of them it's a "matter of honour" for him not to have his ass handed to him, and to have them hold you while he beats on you (again). Been on the receiving end of that one more than once (tho that was 15+ years ago).
The problem is worse these days simply because there's fewer repercussions. Back then, if you beat the snot out of someone, with 50 people standing around watching, there was a fairly good chance that that would be the end of it. Sure, there were a Malfoy types who would ensure that they'd catch you alone, afterwards, behind the bike sheds, with 5 hulking neanderthals to back them up, but it wasn't often.
These days, if you beat the crap out of someone, or even just annoy them, they'll come gunning for you, literally. I often cannot reconcile the apparent 'offence' with the seriousness of the reaction that it generates. This is particularly true in South Africa (where I live). SA has pretty much the highest violent crime rate in the world. Johannesburg has the unenviable reputation of having the most aggressive and road-rage prone drivers in the country (and thus, the world). And I've noticed that the dumber (or more wrong) they are, the angrier they get if they are confronted.
Case in point: I was involved in an incident the other day. Young Joe Wife-beater (you know the type: mid-twenties, bullet head, stubble-goatee, sunglasses, wannabe bouncer) came flying up behind me in his car. He wasn't watching what we was doing, going way too fast, veering in and out of traffic. I think he was more interested in scaring the girl in the passenger seat into believing what a legend he was than actually driving somewhere specific. Just then, a car pulled out in front of me, from a side-street. I braked, not too sharply, and I heard this screech of tyres behind me, and heard someone leaning on their hooter. I had been fully aware of him, but he was a good way back, and I thought he'd seen me slow down. Any halfway decent driver watches at least TWO cars ahead, anyway, not just the one in front. He obviously hadn't been watching anything, other than his gf. I looked in my rear-view mirror, and he was waving his arms, making flashing signs with his hands, and obviously swearing at me. The vapid-looking female in the passenger seat next to him was also glaring at me.
I looked at him in my mirror, raised my hands, with a confused look on my face, as in "dude? wtf?!". He made one final rude gesture, stopped waving his arms, and I thought that was the end of it. A few minutes later, I'm in the suburbs, and he's still following me. He follows me right into the housing complex where I live, and at this point I start getting a bit worried. I'm not aggressive, and I don't want to get into it with this guy, so I take some random turns, just to check, and yeah, he's still following me. So I drive around a bit more, until I find someone who's working in their yard, next to the road. I figure that if I stop and it turns nasty, at least there would be a witness. At this point I am not intending on their being any fisticuffs
I got out of my car, did the whole arms out, hands open, the whole "relax, there's no problem here" body language thing, and said loudly (and curiously), "why are you following me?". He came at me, head jutting forward, chest and shoulders puffed up, nostrils flared, fists bunched, wife-beater vest flapping, the whole "I am SO going to fuck you up!" attitude. I thought "ah shit, I thought I left this crap back in high-school". Luckily he stopped short. I think he realised he didn't really have enough reason to immediately take a swing (and I sure as shit wasn
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
As soon as a computer entered the building, it became the school's responsibility to address. If it is possible for the student to be bullied at his desk via the school-supplied computer, the school district has the responsibility to govern the behavior. If the cell phone is allowed in the school, it is also.
It's amazing. 25 years later, and you still have no idea why this guy was bullying you.
Someday you'll learn.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'm sorry, I've had time to think about my flip response to you and it's very clear that you've been damaged in your past. It is unfair of me to have been so glib.
It is readily apparent that you have not been given the proper coping tools, and you are deficient. I only wish your parents, relatives, or some other role model could have influenced you in a positive manner so that you would not have turned into such a violent, angry, sad, little boy. Your inner child cries for attention, and you have found none. I weep for you.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.