October is National Bullying Prevention Month. Bullying is no longer relegated to the playground or the neighborhood. It now regularly happens in the cyberworld. Kids don’t expect that and often don’t know how to handle it.
In October 2006, thirteen-year-old Megan Meier hung herself in her bedroom closet after suffering months of cyberbullying. She believed her tormentors’ horrid insults, never thought she could find a way to stop them, and killed herself. She’s not the only one. In fact, according to StopBullying.gov, 52 percent of young people report being cyberbullied and over half of them don’t report it to their parents.
Everyone knows what bullying is — someone being taunted physically or mentally by others — and there are endless resources devoted to educating both students and teachers on how to combat bullying. But what about cyberbullying? Wikipedia defines “cyberbullying” as:
the use of information technology to repeatedly harm or harass other people in a deliberate manner
Cyberbullying occurs on not just social media like Twitter, Facebook, and topical forums, but multiplayer games and school discussion boards. Examples include mean texts or emails, insulting snapchats, rumors posted on social networking sites, and embarrassing photos or videos.
How serious is it?
The National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center estimates that nearly 30 percent of American youth are either a bully or a target of bullying. 7% of high school students commit suicide, some because of cyberbullying:
On October 7, 2003, Ryan Halligan committed suicide by hanging himself [after being cyberbullied by high school classmates]. His body was found later by his older sister.
It gets worse every year as the Internet plays an increasingly dominant part in student lives at home and school. Exponentially worse. Because this crime is hidden in the vastness of the world wide web, the bully considers themselves anonymous, hiding behind their handles and fake profiles, making it difficult to find the guilty parties. As a result, too often, everyone thinks someone else is responsible for stopping it. Parents think they’re invading their child’s privacy by monitoring social media accounts and teachers think they don’t have enough time to monitor school-related virtual meeting places. What makes it even harder to identify and less likely to solve is that students often are reluctant to ask for help.
Effects of Cyberbullying
Kids who are cyberbullied are more likely to:
- use alcohol and drugs
- skip school
- experience in-person bullying
- be unwilling to attend school
- receive poor grades
- have lower self-esteem
- have more health problems
What you can do
There are steps parents and teachers can take to prevent cyberbullying from starting. Discuss this topic with your child (or students) every year, starting as soon as they use multi-player games (often as young as second grade). You think they’re OK because you disabled the online access — think again. These clever digital natives take figuring out how to circumvent your protections as a challenge. Once the emotional damage is done, it’s difficult to undo.
Here are great resources to start or continue your discussions. Be sure to preview them to see if they suit your children or student group. Some are pretty sad:
Here are some digital resources you can use in your classroom. Click here to update the list:
- Calling my Childhood Bully–a video (7 min.)
- Cyberbully–90-minute movie
- Cyberbullying–You’re not Alone — Hector’s World
- Cyberbullying--geared for 5th grade and up; includes common questions students may ask and answers
- Cyberbullying—what is it
- Think Time: How Does Cyberbullying Affect You--a hard-hitting short video that hits all the important points of cyberbullying
- What is Cyberbullying? from Commonsense Media
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“The content presented in this blog are the result of creative imagination and not intended for use, reproduction, or incorporation into any artificial intelligence training or machine learning systems without prior written consent from the author.”
Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, Amazon Vine Voice, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.
