Final Cyber bullying Analysis
I investigated cyber bullying, which has become a massive problem faced by schools since the widespread introduction of technology into our classrooms and homes.
“Cyber bullying is bullying that is carried out with the aid of recent technologies like email, chat rooms, discussion groups, instant messaging and mobile phone texting.”(Ford, 2008)
Franek defines a cyber bully as “anyone who repeatedly misuses technology to harass, intimidate, bully, or terrorize another person” (2005/2006).
It is still unclear how prevalent cyber bullying is in our schools with statistics ranging from 9%- 49% of students experiencing some form of cyber bullying. (Juvonen & Gross 2008) Clearly this is an area that requires further investigation. However, a lower number of 9% of students experiencing/d cyber bullying still results in a significant number. E.g. For a school of 1000 students 90 of those will have been cyber bullied at some point. Once we clearly define how prevalent cyber bullying is it may become easier to address the issue at hand and implement anti-cyber bullying programs.
The department of education has played a large role in what schools are currently doing to deal with cyber bullying issues. The Department of education has deployed a “National Safe schools framework”. The aim of this framework is to “ensure the wellbeing of all Australian students” (Student learning and support services taskforce, 2003). Whilst there are good suggestions, and a good start to begin to stop cyber bullying in our schools there is no suggestion in the framework to ensure that all schools carry out these policies. I believe that until the department of education is able to ensure, and check that these policies are implemented in schools cyber bullying will continue to plague our schools, as many schools may fail to implement the framework properly, if at all.
Ford (2009) recommends using “traditional anti- bullying strategies” to combat cyber bullying. This is because “Cyber-bullying is not so different than regular old school-yard bullying as the tactics employed by the offenders, the people affected, the resulting consequences, and the reasons for the bullying are all basically the same.” (Ford, 2009) Some of his strategies suggested include:
Although these are great suggestions, they can only be put into action, once the victim reports the bullying. Unfortunately up to 90% of victims don’t inform an adult. ((Juvonen & Gross 2008) Unlike traditional bullying where the bullying becomes obvious, cyber bullying can be easily hidden and often anonymous.
For those victims of cyberbullying who feel that they cannot inform an adult identified six key reasons for doing so:
• fear of retribution from the cyber-bully (30 percent);
• it is the student’s problem and not the school’s mandate (29 percent);
• the school staff could not stop the bullying anyway (27 percent);
• they could get their friends in trouble (26 percent);
• their parents would restrict their access to the Internet (24 percent),
and
• other students would label them as ‘informers’ or ‘rats’ (20 percent). (Cassidy, W., Jackson, M., & Brown, K., 2009).
All of these reasons have a core belief of feeling unsafe within the school environment if they were to ‘dob’. For this reason it is important that schools are able to create an environment where students feel safe and comfortable with informing adults of bullying incidents.
Through my research, it appears that the best way to stop cyber bullying would be to effectively teach our children to be cyber safe. According to Baum (2006), there are five things that we can do as educators to ensure the online safety of students:
In saying this, these steps cannot completely stop cyber bullying from occurring. For those students that are being cyber bullied it is important that we encourage our students to attempt to “avoid receiving messages from suspected bullies by blocking their screen names from their computer, restricting buddy lists or changing their own avatar” (Juvonen & Gross 2008).
References
Baum, J. (2006). Cyberethics: The new frontier, redOrbit. Retrieved October 7, 2009 from http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/345993/cyberethics%5fthe%5fnew%5ffrontier/index.html Cited in Endicott-Popovsky , B,. (2009) Seeking a Balance: Online Safety for Our Children, Teacher Librarian, 14811782, Vol. 37, Issue 2
Cassidy, W., Jackson, M., & Brown, K. (2009). Sticks and Stones Can Break My Bones, But How Can Pixels Hurt Me?: Students' Experiences with Cyber-Bullying. School Psychology International, 30(4), 383-402. doi:10.1177/0143034309106948
Ford, A. (2009). School Liability: Holding Middle Schools Liable for Cyber-Bullying Despite Their Implementation of Internet Usage Contracts. Journal of Law & Education, 38(3), 535-543. Retrieved from Education Research Complete database.
Franek, M. 2005/2006. Foiling cyberbullies in the new wild west.
Educational Leadership 63 (4): 39–43. Cited in Kite, S., Gable, R., & Filippelli, L. (2010). Assessing Middle School Students’ Knowledge of Conduct and Consequences and Their Behaviours Regarding the Use of Social Networking Sites. Clearing House, 83(5), 158-163. Accessed on the 1st of September
Juvonen, J. & Gross, E. 2008, ‘Extending the school grounds? Bullying experiences in cyberspace’, The Journal of School Health, v.78, n.9, p.496. Cited in Price, M., & Dalgleish, J. (2010). Cyberbullying Experiences, impacts and coping strategies as described by Australian young people. Youth Studies Australia. Vol. 29 Issue 2, p51-59, 9p, 3 Charts, 1 Graph http://www.mceetya.edu.au/verve/_resources/natsafeschools_file.pdf accessed 15/09/10
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