What we CAN do about cyberbullying!

What we CAN do about cyberbullying!

March 24, 2012generationtextonlineLeave a comment


Most parents have heard of the term cyberbullying, but how is it different than the good old fashioned bullying of their own childhood?

Remember the kids who got pushed into a locker? How about the kid sitting alone in the lunch room? Maybe it happened to you as a teen. Remember how mean the girls could be…spreading rumors and making fun of peoples’ clothes and hair? How about the boys… wedgies in the locker room and on the bus?

Most adults have a personal story of their own. What is yours?

Cyberbullying is a whole different ball game. It’s 24 hours a day and it comes via text message, Facebook and Formspring. The humiliation can be unbearable. 100’s of people see it and the victim can’t erase it. People can say what they want online and the victim has no control over it. Reports about Tyler Clemente, the Rutgers freshman, say he looked at the cyberbullying targeted at him 38 times before jumping off the George Washington Bridge to his death. If you want to get a feel for cyberbullying look at the “comment section” on any NJ.com article or blog where people can leave anonymous messages. And those aren’t teens cyberbullying, those are adults!

An international research project led by an Australian Catholic University (ACU) professor has found that the factors leading to incidents of cyber-bullying are different to those which result in traditional bullying.

(http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=30571)

According to Professor Sheryl Hemphill, the main factors leading to episodes of a traditional bully are:
•academic failure
•family conflict
•past bullying

But what about cyberbullying?? What leads someone to cyberbully another??

The project found only one of these is a factor leading to incidents of cyber-bullying….past bullying in the form of relational aggression, commonly known as:
•exclusion
•spreading rumors.

So what does that mean for MY teen?

Here is what I tell the teens I work with. We can’t control what other people do. We can’t stop someone from cyberbullying. We can’t stop someone from making up lies. We can’t stop someone from trying to humiliate another. We can’t reason or resolve a problem with a cyberbully. A person who chooses to cyberbully finds protection behind the screen or a fake username. A cyberbully is not interested in telling the truth or finding the truth.

So let’s look at this study… if someone being the target of exclusion or a rumor is a factor leading to cyberbullying, we can do something about that. We can control our own behavior. We can control excluding someone or spreading rumors about people. We can teach our kids to be kind and positive. We can teach our kids how to apologize when they have done something to hurt someone. And we can choose not to cyberbully.

–Jill Brown