Published: October 14, 2008 11:14 am            

Parents should be mindful of cyber bullying

I don’t know whether to blame it on movies and TV shows or not, but when I was young I was under the impression that a bully was someone who was about a foot taller than all the other students at your school and he beats up a small group of kids for their lunch money.

While I doubt that that definition of bullying was true when I was a teen, it is even more false today. With the rise of the Internet and other forms of communication, schoolyard taunts and intimidation have found their way into e-mails, chat rooms, text messages, on YouTube, and even social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Bullies are no longer big kids picking on little kids, either. With the anonymity of the Internet, any young person can be a bully or be bullied.

As a result, more teens than ever before are affected by online bullying. In fact, recent research by UCLA found that nearly 3 in 4 teenagers have been the victims of cyber bullying in the past 12 months. The study goes on to report that 85 percent of students bullied online are also bullied at school.

Other research has shown that girls are twice as likely as boys to be victims and perpetrators of cyber bullying, and a study at the University of Alberta even found that girls who consider themselves to be pretty are 35 percent more likely to be bullied.

The most common form of online and in-school bullying was found to be name-calling and insults. The second most common form of cyber bullying is password theft. This involves a bully “hacking” an e-mail, MySpace or other online account of another teen and posting or sending embarrassing information to others. Other forms of cyber bullying include threats, sending embarrassing pictures and spreading rumors.

Unfortunately, while a majority of teens encounter cyber bullying in one form or another, very few of them report these problems to adults. In many cases this is because bullied teens think they are the only ones with these problems and that they should just learn to deal with it.

Bullied teens also worry that if they tell a parent about their problems they will suffer restrictions on their Internet use. For many teens this can seem even more harmful than being bullied because they rely on the Internet for much of their interaction with friends.

So what can parents do? First, it is important to communicate to your teen that they can come to you with any problem that they have and that you won’t overreact. Parents should regularly talk with teens about their online activities and specifically ask about cyber bullying.

Also, teach your teen how to protect himself online. For example, teens shouldn’t choose easy-to-figure-out passwords for online accounts, like a pet’s name or birthday.

Teens should also never respond to cyber bullies. When bullies get a reaction out of their victims, it provides them with satisfaction. If they never get a response, they will eventually quit trying.

Parents should also understand that their teen might be bullying others.

Explain to your teen that they should always consider the consequences of their actions online, and that they should never send a message to someone in anger. Also communicate to your teen that bullying will not be tolerated in your family and that there will be serious consequences for such behavior.

By better understanding the threats of cyber bullying and how teens interact with one another online, parents can both prevent their teens from being the victim of a bully and from becoming an online bully.

        

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