Well that’s a difficult question without an answer. You’d have to ask the Wise People of Society, if they’re online right now.
I don’t have any children, so I wouldn’t know. But in a hypothetical situation I’d make sure my children grasp the importance of life early on, so that they wouldn’t squander it over any temporary sequence of unfortunate events or other distresses that will be gone and forgotten.
I guess I’ll make sure they know about the Battle of Karánsebes in which the Austrian army fought itself by mistake, leaving thousands of fatalities and casualties, to serve as a reminder that no mistake is too great, and that no one’s hands are too clean. I’ll also tell them that we’ve been dead for billions of years before birth, and so we will after death, and that all we get is a hundred years of life with odors and colors and sea and strange things such as bikinis so they’d know not to waste themselves over a goddamn nude photo, or a lost job, or a heartbreak, I think.
One of the things that’s different about kids and adults is that kids are utterly trapped within their school.
That same batch of kids will be there every day, every week, and every month. This year and every year. Yes, there is slow turnover. Yes, if your bully is in a grade ahead of you they’ll graduate to the next level school. And Oh Joy, after a year of relative peace you’ll graduate to join them at that next year’s school.
Like adults in abusive workplaces, they know they’re trapped. But unlike adults in abusive workplaces, they don’t know much about rights or about seeking alternatives. It’s that feeling of helplessness and trappedness that drives the over-the-top reactions.
I am a parent, and I can say firsthand that there may not be anything the parent can do. Kids, especially teens, are loath to confide in their parents, and if the sprog doesn’t tell me, I don’t know. I can pick up on his behavior; if he’s suddenly moody and doesn’t want to go to school, the first question I ask is whether there’s something going on that I need to know about. If he tells me everything is OK, I have to take him at his word and ask his teachers if they know anything. I’d like to think he knows he can confide in me, but he’s a teenager and would probably sooner die.
That said, the sprog is pretty good about walking away from trouble on social media. He has Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and has blocked troublemakers. So far, any teasing has been over some anime that some kid saw on his phone, and that was stopped pretty quickly.
Exactly. Now you’ve got it. They’re children. Even the teens are children. And children aren’t often capable, cognitively, of knowing that there’s Something Bad Out There and choosing not to read it. They don’t have the fully formed sense of self that an adult does, or the maturity to realize that it will hurt worse if they read it. Heck, I was well into my 30s before I really, truly, began to believe that what other people think of me is their problem, not mine. I found out I was being trashed on one of the websites that shall not be named, and yes, I went and read some of it. It hurt, I won’t lie. And it took a while before I realized it hurt more to read it than to not read it and know it’s probably still going on. I couldn’t have done that as a child.
Well, here’s the thing: they’re still figuring out what to say. This is the first generation to deal with this particular form of bullying, so this is the first generation of parents and experts to deal with this problem. They offer advice, but it’s not always very useful, and no one knows if its effective advice yet.
Mostly the advice is to monitor your child’s online activity so that you can prevent them from being exposed to cyber bullying. Which I think is rather…overly optimistic. My 10 year old knows more about online interaction than I do. She knows websites I’ve never heard of. I know enough to forbid Instagram and 4chan and reddit, but I’m sure there are other, possibly worse places out there.
What I do is watch her mood. When she starts getting really sad after spending a lot of time online, I find other things for her to do for a while. I spend time with her, I teach her new skills she can be genuinely proud of accomplishing. I try to build her up. And in the process, I make “offhand” remarks about bullying, and how I’ve had to cope with it online as well as real life, and how sometimes I realize that I just need to walk away from the screen for a bit, and remind myself that while online communication is awesome, it’s also an awesome way for jerks to be jerks, and that has nothing to do with me. And then I don’t say anything at all, I just listen, and let her talk.
I don’t think I can shield her from online bullying and still allow for the social interaction that’s vital these days. I think I have to build a strong child so she can take the blows and still stay standing.
It’s kinda funny that, just when schools finally started taking bullying seriously, the technology comes along that allows the dickheads to conduct their bullshit outside of school. I graduated HS a year before Columbine, and my school never did anything about bullying, fights, whatever. There’d be days when after-school fights were being planned during the day, with rumors flying everywhere, and nobody in the school ever made any attempt to halt it.
Weird kids have it too easy nowadays. They never have to learn to take a punch.
I know other people have mentioned this, but it hardly matters if OTHER people are reading the messages. The damage to your reputation is far more injurious than if it had been a personal insult communicated in private.
By way of example, there was a rather famous cyber-stalking case in which a woman’s information was maliciously placed on some kind of rape fantasy sex site. She was rather distressed when strange men started showing up at her house thinking they could have sex with her. It’s often cited as a case that demonstrates the victim doesn’t actually have to read the message or even use technology to be victimized.
There’s also the exhausting nature of it. You block one account and they just make another. Eventually you’ll just get tired of constantly defending yourself in what appears to be a losing battle. And when every single day someone - or a group of people - is actively seeking you out to tell you that you’re awful, you shouldn’t exist, you’re ugly, you’re stupid, you’re disgusting, you should die, etcetera, it gets to you. And there’s no escaping because you go to the school you go to. Sometimes you get trapped with these people for over a decade. There’s no “just quit and get a new job” or “walk away and go somewhere else” with school. It’s that extra layer of feeling trapped and helpless to fix the situation that really drives people towards the edge.
Star Wars Kid is a good example. We’ve all been caught acting like a knob when we thought we were alone, and been teased. It’s not the end of the world. But is having 30 million faceless assholes online see you acting like a knob and leaving nasty Youtube comments too much to simply brush off? Doesn’t it remain true that we tend to believe others are thinking about us way more than they actually are, and internet hate is much less serious than we perceive?
Re the internet in general: there’s this illusion that when you’re sitting by yourself with your phone or your computer, you’re alone. But you’re not. In the olden days, moms used to say, “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the newspaper.” Hmmm…given the demise of print media, Facebook has a much higher circulation than any newspaper. Plus, tomorrow, the newspaper is garbage. Information on the internet lives forever.
And in some cases, it will follow the bullies themselves. I sure wish some of the things people said to me could still be accessible to employers, their children, etc.