May 2008 — Security
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The Fight Against Cyberbullying
As tales of online cruelty mount, districts are trying a mix of prevention and punishment, incorporating internet safety into curriculum and tightening student conduct codes.
WHAT HAPPENED at Providence High School in Charlotte, NC, this past January showed just how far
the menace of cyberbullying has expanded its reach.
It seemed like a standard, if appalling, case of online
malice: A student was found to have posted defamatory
information about a member of the school on a
popular social networking site.
The difference? The defamed in this instance was a teacher. On a Facebook message board, the student had posted a link to a website with the intent of falsely suggesting the targeted teacher was a pedophile.
The activity was uncovered by a parent and brought to the district's attention. "We took it very seriously," says Cynthia Robbins, media relations supervisor for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), which encompasses Providence High. The district took immediate disciplinary action-including pressing charges against the student for misdemeanor cyberstalking. According to Kenny Lynch, a detective with CMS' law enforcement unit, student-on-teacher cyberbullying reports are on the rise. "Up till the past six months, most of the cases I've worked on involving cyberbullying have been student-on-student," Lynch says. "This year, the four or five cyberbullying cases I've had have all involved student-on-teacher. It seems to be a new trend."
Whether a pattern or merely an unfortunate streak, what's not disputed is the direction of the general drift in cyberbullying cases: upward. Once relegated to the playgrounds and back lots, the schoolyard bully now finds prey online. A 2006- 2007 study by i-Safe, a California-based, congressionally funded organization focused on internet safety, breaks down the prevalence of cyberbullying in schools:
- Twenty-five percent of high school students and 21 percent of students in grades 5 to 8 say they know someone who has been cyberbullied.
- Thirty-two percent of high school students and 17 percent of middle schoolers admit to having said mean or hurtful things to another person online.
The most striking statistic is this: 52 percent of high school students say they themselves have been cyberbullied, while the same percentage say they have cyberbullied others.
Teaching Internet Safety
State lawmakers have taken notice of the troubling trends and statistics and as a preventive effort have begun to pass legislation prescribing some form of internet safety education in schools, with some adding language that specifically identifies the need to address cyberbullying. One such state is Virginia, which passed a bill in 2006 that compels districts to incorporate internet safety instruction into their entire curriculum, and requires that the effort to curb cyberbullying must be written into schools' acceptable use policies.
