Cyberbullies: What you and your children need to know now
While thousands of students are looking forward to the release of their next school year: new school supplies, getting ready for that new outfit or new uniform shirt, or just getting together with friends to start another school roller coaster. There are many others, however, who look at the start of school with trepidation.
They are the new kids, the shy kids, the kids who would rather be anywhere but at school. Why? The reasons take on a myriad of variations, many based on simple “coming of age” angst or “end of summer” depression, but within this group are some kids who are alone in a classroom. These are the kids who, out of shame, embarrassment, or fear, have been or fear being harmed by their peers, or worse, by themselves because they believe they are on their own and “the problem” is too big for them or anyone else to handle. .
At first glance, you may be thinking that I’m talking about gang crime “in the hood.” It’s nothing that obvious. In fact, this crime occurs under the roofs in what appear to be happy families. This crime is insidious, cowardly and criminal. There’s a surge of that in schools across the country. It’s called “Cyber Bullying.”
Cyberbullying takes what used to be name calling, shoving, and shoving in the schoolyard to a whole new, expansive, and very dangerous level. The cyberbully uses email, chat rooms, instant messaging, cell phones, and text messages to insult, demean, threaten, humiliate, harass, deceive, impersonate, and in many cases post lewd or embarrassing photos online of his colleagues, while hiding behind a veil of anonymity offered by the Internet.
At the high school level, typical insults include comments like “You’re ugly, you’re fat, you’re a liar, nobody likes you.” promiscuity. Photos, which are sometimes edited, and cell phone videos are posted in emails and on familiar file-sharing sites such as Myspace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal.com, Blogger.com and others.
Even bad childhood decisions, like when a student creates a website dedicated to posting pictures of the fattest or ugliest kids in school, or when a seventh grade girl in Manhattan posted a video a boy sent her of him singing. a serenade for her. her because she liked him and she didn’t like him. It just seemed like a joke to her, that is, until she ended up being laughed at by the entire Net. Needless to say, this young man was devastated.
Unlike the schoolyard bully, these attacks aren’t from a scary kid wanting to push their weight. They can be from anyone or no one the child knows. Tragically, sometimes it’s from someone the child thought was a friend. And unlike the schoolyard bully, a cyberbully can be understood by one or many children and by the time the post hits the net, literally thousands if not millions of people have seen it, if it’s been shared online. all the world. And unlike the schoolyard bully, the cyberbully beats up their victim in the sanctity of their own home or bedroom, where they feel they can’t escape.
Suzanne Stanford, executive director of My Internet Safety Coach (http://www.myinternetsafetycoach.com), notes, “Kids are often afraid to tell their parents for fear that their computer will be taken away or their parents will do than the situation worse.” What they don’t realize is that unless the bullying is stopped immediately, it can escalate and leave permanent psychological scars.
That’s one of the reasons Ms. Stanford recommends the Children’s Educational Network’s FREE Internet filter and parental control software and the TUKI Browser for Kids, available at http://www.TUKI.com.
Children need to know how to safely navigate within this environment, so they know how to prevent and protect themselves from these situations. In addition, we make it very clear to children who want to participate in this type of activity that their behavior has serious personal consequences.
For example, we want them to consider “before” making bad decisions that whatever is posted online is there forever, and as much as they later regret having done this to someone, the damage is already done and is irreversible.” Experts in the field claim that the victims of these crimes suffer psychological trauma that requires professional help, they have had to move to other schools, their mental state has resulted in their grades dropping to such a degree that they cannot qualify for university afterward. of graduating from high school; many are afraid of forming close relationships with new people and, in more serious cases, it has resulted in suicide or murder.
These are not just childish pranks. These are serious crimes, and several states are enacting laws, like Florida, that make these emails a felony. In Pennsylvania, cyberbullying, stalking, and stalking carry stiff jail terms and fines for those convicted.
Cyberbullies need to realize that they can hide from their victims behind screen names, but they cannot hide from law enforcement. Mark Franek, Dean of Students at Philadelphia’s William Penn Charter School, explained the process very well: “Every time the Internet is accessed, an IP (Internet Protocol) address is established. The 12 numbers scored by the 3 dots is the electronic address fingerprint that can be accessed by authorities to trace all electronic communications between computers and/or mobile phones. No computer or mobile phone, or its user, is truly anonymous in cyberspace.”
According to a June 2000 survey of 1,500 children ages 10 to 17 by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 1 in 17 youth had been threatened or harassed over the Internet, and approximately one-third of them felt that the incidents they were extremely distressing. . A 2004 study in Britain by NCH, a British children’s charity, found that 1 in 4 students had been bullied online.
According to a 2005 CBS 2 (television) special report, more than 50% of students in grades 4-8 have been bullied online. A recent national survey of kids and tweens by i-Safe America found that 57% of kids in grades 4-8 said someone had said hurtful or angry things to them online, 13% “fairly often”; 53% admitted to saying mean or hurtful things to others, 7% “quite often”; 35% had been threatened online, 5% “quite often”; 42% had been bullied online, 5% “quite often”; and 58% had not told their parents or another adult that they had received mean or hurtful comments. In the UK, 33% of 9-19 year olds who use phones with email, chat, instant messaging and/or text messages at least once a week “received mean or hurtful messages, and only 4% of parents say their child has been bullied online, according to very recent research from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The Internet and cell phones have become, to a large extent, the fabric of social life for tweens and teens. As such, they are prime targets for this type of attack. The first thing kids need to understand about instant messaging and blogging (web logs) or live journals is that the more personal information you give someone, the more it can be used against you not just by those you want to read. but by others who are not. Every time you write something online and hit “send,” you’ve just given up your privacy. Additionally, people online will pose as non-persons for the purposes of deception and, in many cases, to commit crimes, often stealing someone’s identity in the process.
Some helpful tips for kids and teens about cyber bullying:
o Know that there are ALWAYS people available to help you who will stop cyberbullies. These people are law enforcement; your school teacher, school counselor, principal; your parents or a responsible and caring adult; Cybercrime reporting sites such as: http://www.cybertipline.org, http://www.wiredsafety.net, http://www.KidSafe.com, and [email protected].
o Do not provide any personal information such as your name, the name of your school or the name of any of the sports teams you play for, your home or cell phone number, your address, including the city where your other parent lives if they are divorced, the address of their parents’ office or the address of their school.
o Never use your real name as your username or screen name.
If you discover that you are a victim of cyber bullying:
o Do not respond to bullies directly because that is exactly what they want. Don’t give them the pleasure of knowing you’re upset about it. Stay calm.
o Save and print all messages – DO NOT DELETE EMAILS.
o Report this crime to the police. If possible, report it while it’s happening.
o Take notes: Please provide the name of the harassers, if you know it, and all the details about the incident(s)
o If you are afraid of calling the police, email an incident report to cybercrime reporting sites such as: http://www.cybertipline.org, http://www.wiredsafety.org or safety@ mundokids.net.
REMEMBER: YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF YOUR ONLINE EXPERIENCE. IT IS UNACCEPTABLE THAT YOU WILL BE VERBALLY ABUSED OR THREATENED
If you want to BLOCK USERS from contacting you via email, please do the following:
o Look for the “Lock” button. Sometimes it’s in your inbox.
o Block someone by highlighting or checking the box next to their email and then clicking the Block button. When you do this, all emails from the address you blocked will not reach your inbox.
In Outlook Express, go to a “Blocked Senders List”. To do this, do the following:
Click on:
or “Tools”
or “Message Rules”
or “List of blocked senders”
or Click “Add”
o Type the person’s email address in the box, or right-click the person’s name in your contact list.
o Click on “Mail Messages” to block only emails; “News messages”, if you want to block communication from a newsgroup or someone in a newsgroup; o “Mail and News Messages” to block people’s personal email and newsgroup communication.
If you are still receiving messages from someone who is harassing you online, after doing the above, change your email address.
It is an unsettling thought for any parent to think that their child may or may not be the victim of a Cyber Bully. As difficult as it is to consider, both parents and teachers need to talk about this topic at home and in the classroom. We need to raise awareness of this issue and be proactive. Legislators are currently drafting laws to prevent and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. Education, vigilance, and strict laws are key to disarming bullies.