CYBERBULLYING; Technology Gives Teens Myriad Ways to Torment Their Peers

By Maria Elena Baca

Bullying is no longer the domain of the biggest or strongest. In a world of text messaging, picture phones and social networking Web sites, the keypad can be mightier than the fist. Name-calling. Vicious rumor-mongering. Threats of violence. The harassment can spread and persevere online and be printed and passed around.

"People are too wussie to stand up to the person in real life, so they decide to go on the computer and send mean, nasty messages," said Colleen Harris, 16, who said she has been the target of an online assault. "They’re trying to be mean and vicious, but they’re ignorant. … When they were calling me names, it didn’t faze me at all, but I could see how other kids could be hurt by it."

School officials say the problem is growing, and that it’s difficult to prevent or police because they can’t restrict student speech and laws and legal precedents are murky.

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson recently announced a plan that would add cyber teeth to a 2005 law requiring school districts to adopt written antibullying policies, would redefine harassment to include one-time online attacks and redefine identity theft to include cases that don’t involve financial transactions.

Swanson noted that parents had approached her on the campaign trail with stories about their children being bullied online. "Technology has really exacerbated traditional bullying," she said. "People just need to be more sensitive that cyberbullying is occurring, and occurring every day in a very real fashion. And when it occurs, it creates havoc in people’s lives."

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire researcher Justin Patchin has gathered chilling examples of such attacks. A girl, 13, badgered via text message for details about her body. A teen outed as bisexual by Internet bullies and told he was going to hell. A boy, 15, taunted about his ethnic background and threatened that he would be assaulted.

In a national survey done last spring by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, 9 percent of 1,500 kids ages 10-17 reported being targets of online harassment; 28 percent reported making "rude or nasty comments to someone on the Internet." The study also found that kids who are targets of cyberbullies are three times more likely than non- victims to target others.

Michele Ybarra, president of Internet Solutions for Kids, a California-based advocacy group, collaborated on the study and wrote about the findings in a recent issue of the journal Pediatrics.

"It’s important to acknowledge and understand and learn about how kids may be interacting on the Internet, both in similar ways and different ways from the traditional world," she said. "We don’t know yet if Internet harassment is more or less upsetting to kids; for some adults, it’s more scary because they don’t understand the Internet."

Cathy Stahl and Deborah Istre, senior health promotion specialists for Hennepin County, Minn., coordinate an antibullying program that’s been adopted by more than a dozen suburban middle schools. Cyberbullying is one aspect of the program, created at the University of Bergen in Norway. The program requires schools to take a preventive stand against bullying, then, as incidents occur, to work with the perpetrator and victim to prevent the behavior from recurring. The county has taken on the project as a crime prevention tool.

"In the past, as adults, we would view bullying as normal kid behavior, something that kids grow out of, [that] targets just need to toughen up and deal with, and the behavior will pass," said Stahl.

As a prevention specialist and peer mediation adviser, Celeste Gorman often works with kids who have become embroiled in online disputes.

"With any perpetrator of bullying, there’s a need for power that doesn’t necessarily mean physical power," she said. "Information becomes money to them. The kid who knows all the gossip has the power. Nobody messes with that person."

Most students eventually are able to move on. Some aren’t so lucky. David Knight of Burlington, Ont., left school to finish his senior year at home after bullies dedicated a Web site to trashing him, including spreading rumors that he used a date rape drug to molest young boys.

The December issue of Seventeen magazine contained a profile of a 15-year-old Florida boy who committed suicide in 2005 after a cyberbully spread rumors that he was gay. A Vermont teen also committed suicide in 2003 after months of incessant harassment, including instant message exchanges with another teen who encouraged him to take his own life.

Reaction sometimes depends on the teen’s self-esteem and resilience. The New Hampshire study found that 39 percent of kids who are harassed reported feeling distressed by it. Younger teens tended to be much more traumatized. Certain triggers increased the stress, including aggressiveoffline contact: phone calls, visits to the victim’s home and unwanted gifts.

"We’re talking about a really small subset of kids who report this stuff," Ybarra said. "It’s not surprising that it is associated with a greater likelihood of being distressed, and it’s more creepy if you don’t know the person, or if you only know them online and somebody shows up at your doorstep."

Many teens say that online bullying isn’t on their parents’ radar. Carolynne Hahn, 16, a sophomore at Avalon School in St. Paul, recently completed a multimedia project on cyberbullying and "mean girls" who gossip, exclude and destroy other girls’ reputations. She has seen a few of her friends land at the center of a cyber battle.

"Parents don’t know their kids have a MySpace [page], and if they do, they don’t monitor it," she said.

The New Hampshire study found that 67 percent of kids who were harassed told someone: a friend or sibling (45 percent) or a parent (31 percent). Of those who didn’t tell, they found, 63 percent said the incident wasn’t serious enough, and 14 percent thought they’d get in trouble. Patchin, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, has collected about 6,000 teens’ anecdotes about bullying on the Web. Of those, 40 percent told nobody; only 14 percent reported telling an adult. "Kids don’t want to talk to their parents because they don’t want their computer privileges revoked," he said.

Revoking computer access is a mistake, he said, because kids need to be computer-literate to succeed. Instead, parents should offer guidance and scrutiny to help prevent kids from becoming bullies or victims.

"Just like you want to know where your kids are and who they’re with after school, you should ask them where they go online, who they hang out with online," Ybarra said.

Asked whether more parental supervision could prevent Internet bullying, Colleen Harris was skeptical. "No amount of parent intervention will make rumors stop."

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>Online help

www.cyberbullying.us: The Web site kept by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Justin Patchin and his research partner, Sameer Hinduja , of Florida Atlantic University. Anecdotes, tips, numbers and media coverage.

www.cyberbully.org: Sponsored by the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, with lots of resources and links on staying safe online.

www.isolutions4kids.org: Web site for Web-related health researcher Michele Ybarra. Facts, figures and tips for parents and kids.

www.internetsuperheroes.org: A site created by WiredSafety.org that includes Marvel Comics characters such as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four and more.

(c) 2007 Buffalo News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.