Poll indicates 13 million children have been "cyber bullied"

A national poll indicates that more than 13 million children between the ages 6 to 17 have been "cyber-bullied," with 2 million victims telling no one about the threats. The poll was commissioned by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, which says that bullying has evolved to include anonymous threats and harassment over the Internet through web pages, e-mails and instant messaging or text messages, and calls on a teen's cell phone. The poll found that: (1) mean, threatening, or embarrassing things were written online about one in three teens and one in six preteens; (2) 10% of teens and 4% of preteens were threatened online with physical harm; and (3) preteens received as many e-threats at school. According to Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, most students do not know where the harassment comes from or who is doing it, but the problem can cause serious stress, and even lead to suicide. "The bully now has not only the playground but the Internet at his or her fingertips to electronically assault other children," adds Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett. Mr. Shurtleff is calling on the U.S. Congress to provide funding to local school districts so they can develop programs to prevent cyber-bullying. He also notes that while Utah has no policy that addresses harassment or bullying by electronic means, he would welcome passage of one by the state legislature.
       Such statistics are catching the attention of school officials. The Pasco County, Florida school system recently updated its student code of conduct to clarify that bullying by electronic means will be treated as seriously as the schoolyard variety. Legal experts tend to agree that school officials are on solid ground to respond when a clear link can be shown between the bullying and school. The greater challenge is when cyber-bullying occurs totally off-campus. For example, a lot of teenage social activity is taking place on instant messaging networks, blog sites, private web sites, and a host of online social networks, such as My Space.com, Xanga.com, and Facebook.com, says Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. With no clear connection to school, some officials opt to take no action out of fear of overstepping their authority and running into free-speech issues. At most, they might confront students and inform parents to give them an opportunity to resolve the issue. When off-campus activity appears to be criminal or raise the prospect of violence, school officials are more likely to respond. "The burden is on the school district to show that the cyber-bullying has a significant impact on the school," says NSBA Staff Attorney Thomas Hutton. "There’s also a risk that if you do intervene in off-campus activity, you may be assuming some responsibility for policing other activity that happens off campus. Someone might turn around and sue you for failing to intervene."
       H. Wesley Perkins, a sociology professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, believes one key to reducing bullying is to show students that bullying is not the norm but the exception. "What we've seen consistently is that risk behaviors [and] problem behaviors are overestimated," Professor Perkins says, "which [means] much of the bullying or violence or substance abuse can continue because the people engaged in that think everybody else is doing it." He and his colleague David Craig believe that adapting the tactic of social norm intervention, used to lower excessive drinking on college campuses, can help reduce the incidents of bullying. They argue that the starting point is to provide students with credible bullying data from their own school, not a state or national average, and have developed a survey for schools funded by the New Jersey and U.S. Departments of Education. Another key is to convince students that their peers will support their efforts to report bullying. According to one of Prof. Perkins’s middle school surveys, 74% of students believed they should report bullying but only 52% believed their classmates would support this action. Marlene Snyder, training director for the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program at Clemson University's Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life, agrees that school officials need to reach the "silent majority." She says students often become bystanders because they "don't know what to do, [and] they have an innate sense that if they do it wrong, they're going to be next.... The big danger is ... they lose empathy and begin to think ... bullying is just a fact of life." Olweus, considered a model program, trains not just students, but also teachers, staff, and parents. Not all experts agree with Prof. Perkins’s approach. Henry Wechsler, an expert on college alcohol issues at the Harvard School of Public Health, believes students are more influenced by immediate peers than by a schoolwide group. "We've consistently found that [people's] drinking habits ... are related to the habits of their group," he says.

Deseret Morning News
By Suzanne Struglinski
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Philadelphia Daily News
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School Board News
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Christian Science Monitor
By Stacy A. Teicher
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