If you bully a classmate online and he gets insulted, you may face some trouble with your school. If you target a figure of authority, you face a lot more of it.
That’s what happened to Donny Tobolski, a 15-year-old student of Mesa Verde High School in Citrus Heights, California, who posted on Facebook that his honors biology teacher a “fat a**” and a “douche bag.” The school deemed these comments “cyberbullying”, and the District suspended Tobolski indefinitely.
But just where should a school draw the line between what’s cyberbullying and what’s nothing more than juvenile name-calling? According to California’s AB (Assembly Bill) 86, passed in 2008, schools are allowed to investigate cyberbullying that their students commit. The bill “adds bullying committed by means of an electronic communication device to the list of activities that school districts, law enforcement agencies and agencies that serve youth are encouraged to prevent.”
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Cyberbullying is a raging phenomenon amongst today’s Internet-savvy teens. With so many venues to attack and insult each other, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, test messaging... youth receive mean messages all the time. A recent New York Times feature told several personal stories of young people who had been victims of cyberbullying.
The Times says, “This is a dark, vicious side of adolescence, enabled and magnified by technology. Yet because so many horrified parents are bewildered by the technology, they think they are helpless to address the problems it engenders.”
Parents are not sure how to tackle this issue, as seen by the comments posted to this article online. A debate emerges between those parents who advocate for stricter parenting: more restrictions on Internet privileges and harsher punishment for inappropriate actions, versus those who argue that kids will be kids, and that as adults adapt to the technology their kids are using, they will slowly be able to figure out a solution.
Check out some of the comments below:
Elisabeth says...
All of us experimented with bullying at some point in our life... We need patience and understanding. It is just going to be rough sailing, till we get a few generations under out belt, and learn (operative word here)how best to handle computer technology and children. After all, it took 80 years after the car was invented to come up with child seats.
Mary says...
I am a teacher. A number of years ago, I was teaching in a large high school of several thousand students. As I came down the hallway during passing time, I saw a number of students gathered in a circle and heard the chant: "Fight, fight.." I couldn't see who was fighting, so I actually crawled under the legs of the encircled students. Two girls were fighting. I grabbed the girl closest to me, expecting her to turn and resist my efforts to break up the fight. Instead, I felt her relief as she relaxed in my grasp. I saw her eyes-- she was thankful I had stopped the fight. As much as they may complain, young people want adults to be in charge. When adults let kids run wild, that is exactly what they do -- digitally or otherwise. Many adults leave teenagers to their own devices at precisely the age when they most need adult wisdom and common sense.
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The trend of teen violence being captured, viewed, and then spread on social networking sites continues. Recently, a couple of kids from Newark, Ohio were on camera taunting a 15-year-old girl who said she disliked a particular hip-hop group. The girl and her boyfriend were video taped as they walked to her house. In the video you can hear a classmate offering one of the other female students five dollars to punch the girl walking home. Eventually, the student does punch her.
The video was posted on MySpace and then on CNN’s iReport. A local newspaper reporter came a cross the video and contacted local authorities. County Prosecutor Ken Oswalt said the teenage student who punched the girl on camera is being charged as a juvenile Tuesday with individual counts of assault, menacing and unlawful restraint. He also added that they are looking into charging other people from the video for inciting the fight.
Video fights are popular on YouTube. For example, searching “teen fights” gives you a result of 17,000 videos. One video that made headlines was the brutal and deadly beating of teenage boy in Chicago. It was video taped and uploaded on YouTube.
Today a Los Angeles judge plans to overturn the jury conviction of Missouri woman, Lori Drew, whose role in a faux online relationship led to the suicide of her daughter's "frenemy." A frenemy is defined by the Urban Dictionary as "Someone who is both friend and enemy, a relationship that is both mutually beneficial or dependent while being competitive, fraught with risk and mistrust." Drew, 50, w Read more...
