Ask anyone even tangentially related to the education profession what one of the hottest topics is these days and they'll tell you it's bullying or cyber bullying. It seems like every where we turn, there's a new campaign, a new slogan or a new summit talking about the consequences, reasons why and effects of bullying. One of the questions that most educators end up asking is "When did it get so bad?".
I submit that it was always this bad, it just took the advent of the Internet to make it public and give it another dimension. Here's why:
I was bullied as a kid in junior high and elementary school. I was called a nerd, fat, a dyke...etc. In sixth grade, there was a girl who used to throw my jacket down the hall every morning. Upsetting? You bet. When you were called names on a regular basis in school, you just took it. You didn't want to risk being seen as the snitch and therefore opening yourself up to the very thing you were trying to avoid. Did it make school terrible? Absolutely. But this was before the internet was rampant, before the advent of Facebook and Myspace and whatever else. I could go home at the end of the day and be free of all those kids. And because I never told anyone, my torment was private. It was bad and no one knew unless I told them.
Now, kids who are bullied don't have a choice to go home and be free. They have to field personal attacks on their web pages, through text messages and through emails. There is literally nowhere these bullied kids can go and be free of their attackers.
But, you say, why can't they just unplug? Well, if you're a kid that doesn't have many friends to begin with, the internet opens all these doors where you can meet like minded people and actually be on the inside of a group instead of on the outside. So these kids, seeking refuge from their tormentors, now have to deal with them in the only safe space they know.
A side note about the tormentors: I think that cyberbullying has become the drug of choice for so many students these days because of the nature of the Internet. When we're on the Internet, it's very hard to imagine there's actually a person on the other end of those words. You tend to disconnect the actual person from the scrolling words and text stops having meaning. That's a dangerous disconnect and I think one that we really need to be pushing home to our students. Words have consequences. Even if it's someone you'll never meet, only see once a day or have never met but are trashing because it's the cool thing to do-your words have consequences.
And now since all of that is visibly documented on the Net, parents and administrators have the ability to see how kids are talking to each other and the problem becomes more apparent. I submit that digital children have a hard time comprehending how public things are on the Net. To them, (and this is a little bit of child psychology) the world revolves around what they percieve and the big picture is almost unobtainable. The idea of anyone being able to see the hateful things they put on other people's profiles is so foregin, educator might as well be speaking a different language.
How do we fix it? I honestly don't know. But I know that it starts in the classroom. It starts with the teacher being a good model of respectful behavior, not tolerating those who are mean, and encourages parents to get involved at home. It starts with parents actually monitoring their children's online activity and contacting administrators and authorities when they feel something is wrong. It does not start with the same old platitudes kids have been hearing. It does not start with ignoring the Internet's influence on this. It also does not start with limiting kid's access to the Internet. Teach them to be smart, teach them that their actions have consequences and that the Net is nowhere near as anonymous as they think it is.
Helpful Links:
The It Gets Better Project: http://www.itgetsbetter.org
The Trevor Project: http://www.thetrevorproject.org/
President Obama's recent summit on bullying: White House Summit
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