What You Need to Know About Kids, Cyberbullying and How to Stop It

New Ways to be Mean

By Susan Flynn

In the not-so-distant past, kids who wanted to pick on someone after school might make a crank phone call. Today, the arsenal of technological tools available to harass their classmates is far more extensive, accessible and, some would say, dangerous.

They can send mean text messages from cell phones at all hours of the day. They can post unflattering photos of peers on Facebook. They can upload an embarrassing video onto YouTube to be viewed by millions.

Students have been subjected to traditional bullying – teasing, spreading rumors, shoving a kid against the locker – for generations. What’s new, experts say, is the increased means to be mean.

“In a lot of ways, technology has made our lives easier,” says Joan Scribner, a high school principal and president of the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators’ Association. “But it has also made kids a little braver in their bullying. The taunting and the teasing have certainly risen to a different level. We all see it as a growing problem.”

By now you’ve likely heard the term “cyberbullying,” defined as repeated, electronic-based bullying via computers and cell phones. According to one recent survey by the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, 42 percent of students say they’ve been the victims of cyberbullying. In one highly publicized case, an autistic student on Cape Cod attended his first school dance and was videotaped by a student with a cell phone. The student later posted the clip on YouTube and classmates posted comments making fun of the 12-year-old and his dance moves.

“Adolescents can do very mean and cruel things,” says Justin Patchin, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization and Web site providing information on the causes and consequences of cyberbullying among tweens and teens. Patchin and center co-director Sameer Hinduja are associate professors in criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Florida Atlantic University respectively.“What we have found,” Patchin says, “is that a lot of things kids will say online, they would never do in real life.”

Therein lies one of the main differences with cyberbullyinga versus the traditional bullying counterpart – the victims often do not know the identity of their harasser. Is it a friend? An old boyfriend? Someone in gym class? The anonymity tends to make the “bully” braver, and more reckless. Or sometimes, an e-mail intended as a joke is not interpreted that way and blows up into a feud among friends, once it is forwarded again and again.