Irish Gov't Seeks To Rein In Cyber Bullying

An anonymous reader points out a story on the Irish Times that says "the Irish government is looking for ways to combat 'cyber-bullying' after data indicated that a significant percentage of young children are subjected to this kind of abuse via their mobile phone and popular social network accounts. The industry has been asked to come up with solutions for this problem and a government office is due to publish a guide on the issue in the near future. Surely this is a problem faced by children in all developed countries these days." Add "for the children" to the list of reasons to track the Web-site habits of mobile web users in Ireland.

Comments

Just plain bullying

[bigtomrodney]

As an Irish person I'm glad that something is being done about bullying. I was bullied at school a lot and when not being beaten was subject to horrendous psychological bullying.

The main point here though is that so-called "Cyber-bullying" is just bullying. Various organisations have been sensationalising this issue by prefixing [i]cyber[/i] and pretending it's a new issue. What about when I was receiving phone calls at all hours? Was that cyber-bullying? It was just called bullying in my day.

I really think that this whole issue is doing more to harm the reputation of the internet/computers/phones than it is to resolve the larger issue of bullying. All I expect to see from this is a large set of draconian yet ineffective restrictions placed around communication media and this is something that disgusts me for a lot of reasons.

Re:Just plain bullying

[bigtomrodney]

Apologies for replying to myself but my first post doesn't read back the way I intended it to.

I would like something to be done about bullying as a whole, but I suspect that when implemented under the banner of cyber-bullying it will completely miss the point and will likely be doomed to failure. The emphasis on the 'cyber' aspect tells me it'll be cheap and ineffective technological measure when we could be using this opportunity to tackle bullying in the wider scheme.

Re:Just plain bullying

[Chrisje]

I can't agree more. On the risk of sounding jaded/damaged, I have the following comments:

As someone that got bullied in the Netherlands I can vouch for the fact that the solution shouldn't come from outside. After many years of psychological and physical bullying (I still have a skull fracture scar to show for it), I decided to fight back at the age of 13. I did this in such a way that I immediately got left alone for the rest of my school years.

Take the biggest bully. Hurt him. A lot. Publicly. Even if you end up on the losing end of the fight at large, it's over. People might think you're a psycho, but it beats being bullied. Turning to a mobile operator to "prevent" bullying is sheer nonsense. The wankers will always find a way. It's not an Irish problem and it's not a problem of technology. It's about me sending my kid to self defense classes as soon as he's old enough.

I've found that those that excel at violence really don't need to use it.

Re:Just plain bullying

[bigtomrodney]

and to the parents that don't teach their children how to cope with being bullied.

Bollocks . When mob mentality comes into it, you see how well you stand up against 15-20 people. It's starts with the leader of the cool gang, then it's the cool gang and then it's the people siding with the rest of them to keep on the good side.

It's amazing how one or two bad apples can turn the tables. It is not the Hollywood image of one bigger kid pushing people around - far from it. The big kids, much like bigger dogs, have nothing to prove.

Re:Just plain bullying

[theaveng]

The solution is to stop raising a bunch of rude brats. The parents/teachers need to tell teenagers, "You have the body of an adult (reproduction, et cetera), and now it's time to start acting like one. Abuse of your peers will Not be tolerated." The bullying messages and phone calls are just a symptom, and treating the symptom is not going to cure the disease. You need to go directly to the source and teach teens to act with manners & that insulting other people is Not acceptable.

I too was bullied as a kid, not with internet but with verbal abuse, which led me to keep quiet so nobody noticed me. I never "escaped" that verbal abuse until I found myself in college with an adviser who refused to tolerate such behavior from his students. That's what we need today, but starting at age 13. If we can teach teens about adult behaviors like sex, then surely we can teach them manners too.

Re:Just plain bullying

[jonaskoelker]

if you cant learn to stick up for yourself as you are growing up god forbid when it comes time to step into the real deal where people are cut-throat just put a nicer face on it.

Let's have a Skinnerian look on this: rewarded behavior is repeated, punished behavior is not. Behavior that elicits no response, either good or bad, is not repeated, but that's learned slower.

To make bullying stop, you either have to not respond at all, or to punish the bullies. How could you punish them? Beat them up? I've done that a few times, doesn't work; plus, you get punished for it when people tell on you. Call them names? They don't care. Break their stuff? They'll enact their revenge. They're always better armed than you, because there are more of them. When ever you try standing up for yourself, they tread on you some more, and the "justice" system treads on you as well.

Then you can do nothing. That makes you an easy target, and it means you effectively don't mind them calling you names, punching your lunch out of your hands and onto the floor, breaking your stuff and being violent towards you.

You're saying that people should either fight an unwinnable war, or let themselves be conquered without offering any resistance. Right?

Re:Just plain bullying

[characterZer0]

Oh please. Adults act exactly the same way.

Re:Just plain bullying

[HungryHobo]

Disproportionate retaliation works great.
I remember a few grades below me there was one of those overgrown douche-wads who tended to push round the others because he could. Well one day he went after a weedy little guy who happened to have balls like church bells.
The ambulance took the dickhead away with a 5 inch strip of skin missing from the side of his face and since the teachers heard the full story all the little guy got was a few detentions.
Big guy stopped hassling others and nobody ever fucked with the little guy every again.

We also had a case where a gang of 8 guys attacked some of my friends, I'll give the full story if anyone wants but it ended with a mob or 70 chasing them across the quad. We had plenty of fights at our school but gangs of tough guys attacking individuals simply wasn't tolerated by the students themselves.

School is basically like prison with less rape and more monotonous labour.

I used to be bullied

[Anonymous Coward]

It stopped when I was legally able to drive. Nothing concentrates the mind of someone who beat you up in the playground as much as seeing you accelerate towards them and swerve away at the last second later in the day.

Learn a lesson from America

[MikeRT]

The main reason we have a lot of bullying is that we have policies that don't allow students to ever confront bullies and use force to defend themselves when attacked. If a student punches a bully in the face for trying to do some sort of nasty physical bullying, like locking them in a locker, they can get suspended/expelled and arrested.

Let the victims of bullies stand up for themselves. It used to work in this country. When my dad was bullied at an early age back in the 1950s, he and the bully got into a fight and the bully got beaten up. The principle not only didn't care about the harm done to the bully, but hauled him into his office and called his parents to let him know that he had gotten beaten up by a kid who he had severely bullied. Back then the courts would have laughed any lawsuit over that out of court and would have probably awarded legal fees to my grandmother if she had to hire a lawyer to defend my dad.

The solution to bullying isn't "education," it's letting them get subjected to the consequences of their actions. I would consider it poetic justice if in a modern incident like what happened to my dad, the kid not only beat up the bully, but posted the video to Youtube for the whole world to mock the shit out of the bully.

Don't give me that "oh they're hurting on the inside" argument for treating them like a wounded animal, instead of a predator. Most people choose to not become like those who hurt them. Those that do choose that path shouldn't be shown any particular mercy by society or the legal system when their victims put them harshly in their place.

with an iron fist

[teazen]

Ah... my shoddy mastery of the English language made me read the headline as 'Irish government seeks to reign in cyber bullying', which to me seems to be a much more attainable goal.