Thread: Online Bullies?

Teens take bullying to the Internet, study finds

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hateful text messages, abusive e-mails and cyber-gossip are giving bullies new power over their victims -- even in the supposed safety of their own homes, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

And most of the victims are themselves new, with two-thirds of children who report such harassment saying they had not been bullied before in other ways.

Schools and parents must work together to find ways to stop such behavior, without robbing children and teens of valuable Internet access, the researchers agreed.

"Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty," Kirk Williams and Nancy Guerra of the University of California at Riverside wrote in one of a series of reports published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The reports, from researchers organized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show a 50 percent increase in the number of kids aged 10 to 17 who said they were harassed online -- from 6 percent in 2000 to 9 percent in 2005.

"Youth harassed online were significantly more likely to also report two or more detentions or suspensions, and skipping school in the previous year," Michele Ybarra and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported in another study in the journal.

"Especially concerning, youth who reported being targeted by Internet harassment were eight times more likely than all other youth to concurrently report carrying a weapon to school in the past 30 days," added Ybarra's team, who interviewed 1,500 10- to 15-year-olds.

They found that 64 percent of those who reported having been bullied online were not victims of physical or verbal aggression in person. That makes for a whole new population of victims, the researchers agreed.

ANONYMOUS ADVANTAGE

An extreme example of the problem occurred in October 2006, when 13-year-old Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, Missouri hanged herself after receiving vitriolic Internet messages from someone posing as a teen-age boy. The town passed a measure making online harassment illegal.

"The anonymity provided by new technology limits a victim from responding in a way that may ordinarily stop a peer's aggressive behavior or influence the probability of future acts, which provides an advantage to the perpetrator," the CDC's Corinne David-Ferdon and Marci Feldman Hertz wrote.

"The primary recommendation we have for parents is to talk to their kids," Ferdon said in a telephone interview. "Talk to them about where they go on the Internet, appropriate standards of behavior."

Schools should also become involved and should add cyber-bullying to any policies they may already have on bullying and other forms of aggression, said Hertz.

Hertz and Ferdon said school districts in Florida, South Carolina, Utah and Oregon are creating new policies to deal with cyber-bullying.

Total bans on using the Internet or text-messaging are unlikely to work, she added. "Technology has a lot of benefits for young people," Hertz said. "They can make social connections that they otherwise might not have the opportunity to make."

Patricia Agatston and colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina interviewed 148 teens in depth and found that teens often did not tell their parents about bullying for fear of losing online privileges.

Man, how does anyone let faceless entities bully them? How are you cowed by words on a screen?

it has increased in the past few years. hostility. think it's an increasing trend?
and we need something like the plague to make people more civil again?

Maybe if parents required their kids to excercise self control, they would be able to walk away from the keyboard..

Maybe if parents take their kids outside once in a while the internet won't feel so important. Then they could get punched in the face, traditional like.

Originally Posted by sectionOne

it has increased in the past few years. hostility. think it's an increasing trend?
and we need something like the plague to make people more civil again?

Yes, I recall after 9/11 when NYC was voted friendliest city or somes uch... No one would say that today...

Fear not, after some cataclysm we'll all be friends...

Originally Posted by Sparta

Maybe if parents take their kids outside once in a while the internet won't feel so important. Then they could get punched in the face, traditional like.

The net is good to pass the time, or to take your mind off things, but it has replaced real life relationships, it has replaced family time and so much more. I'm starting to wonder if we as a society were better off without it. I'm actually glad we didn't have pc's in our home growing up. Nowadays, both parents have one.. in seperate rms, likewise the kids. The parents are probably to busy doing their thing on the net,to even worry about monitoring their kids.

Originally Posted by Morpheus

Yes, I recall after 9/11 when NYC was voted friendliest city or somes uch... No one would say that today...

Fear not, after some cataclysm we'll all be friends...

that was also in some of the discussion I had today. it takes a catastrophy to make people nice.

and this is what Revelation and the ancients knew also. so mankind really hasn't changed much. very predictable.
does this make the future bright or grim?

Originally Posted by sectionOne

that was also in some of the discussion I had today. it takes a catastrophy to make people nice.

and this is what Revelation and the ancients knew also. so mankind really hasn't changed much. very predictable.
does this make the future bright or grim?

So maybe the Saudi's and Bush's who did 9/11 (after all they were eating breakfast together celebrating that morning) had the same message as MLK Jr.? Why can't we all just get along?

Originally Posted by Morpheus

So maybe the Saudi's and Bush's who did 9/11 (after all they were eating breakfast together celebrating that morning) had the same message as MLK Jr.? Why can't we all just get along?

doubtful.
that's not the Islamic way because they don't believe in pluralism.
they believe in their superiority. that won't change. so... no... there will be catastrophy before we can all get along.
if we can understand this there are ways to prepare now to minimalize American deaths.