Mar 16, 2008 - 19:02:38 CDT
(This is the second in a two-part series on bullying.)Someone creates an e-mail address in someone else's name and sends messages while pretending to be the other person. Someone puts a classmate's face on a nude photograph. Someone relentlessly text messages intimidating statements to an acquaintance.
Cyberbullying involves using technology to torment, threaten, harass, humiliate, embarrass or target another person. Threatening another child through a text messages or e-mail counts as cyberbullying, as do many other actions, including pretending to be someone else online, posting sensitive or embarrassing information or sending rude and vulgar messages.
Cyberbullying can be more detrimental to a child's well-being than even physical bullying, said Bismarck Police School Resource Officer Perry Lauer. If a kid is getting beat up on his way to school, he can change his route, travel with friends, or be on the lookout for the aggressor.
"Whereas with the cyberbullying, you can't get away from it," Lauer said. "The psychological aspect can be even more hurtful."
The Internet and other technologies have offered many things to the world, from broader communication capabilities to wider access to news and information. But the World Wide Web also has become the new frontier in crime, featuring online identity theft, e-mail scams and Internet predators.
"It has created a whole new realm for law enforcement in the last 10 years," Lauer said. "It's new ways of crime we weren't seeing before."
Cyberbullying has become part of that realm in recent years and often accounts for a gray area that is hard to stop from happening. Take what happened in an area high school. It was supposed to be a joke, according to the students. Some friends videotaped each other "bullying" another student in the school hallway and posted it on My Space. The school found out, the video came down and the students were disciplined.
"Now there's cyberbullying," said Russ Reihl, Simle Middle School principal. "We're just on the front end of it. They get on the Internet and humiliate someone in front of the entire universe."
Cyberbullying appears to be the spawn of other means of bullying, such as spreading rumors and leaving grafitti messages about other people in public places, said Dr. Kevin Dahmen, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at St. Alexius.
Much of what happens in cyberbullying falls under the category of "freedom of speech," Lauer said. Even vaguely threatening statements posted online often cannot be stopped by authorities. For example, two Bismarck girls posted information online about "doing something" to a third girl. Since no concrete threats were made and no actions were taken, the vague threats did not translate into a criminal situation where law enforcement could arrest or cite the two girls. But crime or no crime, the postings still created anxiety on the part of the third girl, Lauer said.
Sometimes the cyberbullying does become more serious. The threats become more tangible or the messages become too constant to be considered innocent. Police issue juvenile citations for such crimes as terrorizing and harassment. But even when the instances don't reach those levels, school resource officers try to be involved in a proactive manner and explain to the suspected cyberbully what the problem is.
"Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't,"understand why their actions are problematic, Lauer said.
Girls are more likely to be involved in cyberbullying, Lauer said. Heidi Otto, a school program worker with the Mandan Police Department, agreed, saying cyberbullying does not seem to be a big issue in Mandan yet, but girls more commonly are involved in those activities.
"It (cyberbullying) doesn't happen to me or my friends," said Stephanie Becker, a ninth-grader at Wachter Middle School. "I've heard of some people talk about it. It's not as common as (bullying) in school."
Across the board, cyberbullying may be on the increase because it's easy, Lauer said. Aggressors doesn't have to see the reactions from cruel words; they just have to type their message and send or post it.
"It's a lot easier because you don't have to look at the person," he said.
The Internet has become a hot way to communicate for kids, surpassing cell phones and face-to-face contact, Lauer said. But even the youngest parents of school-age children rarely have the same computer savvy as their offspring.
"We didn't grow up with the computer," Lauer pointed out. "We need to catch up."
Parents need to try and be aware of what their kids are doing on the Internet, Lauer said. Just as talking to strangers needs to be applied to online activities, so do lessons of how people should be treated, he said.
When cyberbullying does happen, parents want schools to get involved, said Valerie Fischer, director of the Department of Public Instruction School Health Unit. The messages, however, are created on home computers and on weekends, she said. This is where there needs to be more parental control, she said.
Many kids also have developed a "what happens online stays online" attitude that needs to change, Lauer said. He said parents need to stress to their kids that they need to tell them if anything disturbing happens while they're trolling the Internet.
(Reporter Sara Kincaid contributed to this report.)
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