Beale and hall tells us that in order to combat cyberullying or stay ahead of the epidemic, educators, administrators, parents, and young people need to better understand the nature of it and become fully aware of actions, and strategies that they can undertake to prevent cyberbullying in and out of schools.
It was interesting to find out that administrators only have jurisdiction on cyberbulllying incidents within school grounds. I can understand the legality; however, parents are then left alone to deal with this issue. Research has concluded that the majority of cyberbullying incidents outside of school grounds are correlated with bullying incidents inside the schools.
The article suggests a few strategies administrators, educators, and parents can do.
- Administrators and educators can integrate cyberbullying education into the schools curriculum. Insure school or school board’s anti bullying policy includes cyberbullyling.
- Create a school climate where students feel comfortable reporting cyberbullying incidents.
- School district need to petition state legislatures to add an anti bullying component to existing traditional bullying state laws.
Parents need to view computers as their children see it, a lifeline to their peer groups. Majority of parents see computers as tools, they need to educate themselves in what today’s young people do with technology.
- Learn the IM and texting lingo, such as PIR (parent in room) NOYB (none of your business, and POS (parents over shoulder).
- Learn everything they can about the internet and what their children are doing online.
- Encourage their children to share anything that makes them feel uncomfortable, any information pertaining to cyberbullying.
- Report inappropriate behavior to the major internet service providers, save copies of the harassing messages as proof.
Bullying and other forms of harassment has been around for centuries, will this new form of bullying go away, will we be able to stop it. I believe not; however, if everyone works together we can lower the amount of incidents our young people encounter, and maybe even be able to contain this twenty first century form of bullying.
Surely, this issue has to be addressed from a community perspective. Often parents are ill-equipped to deal with this issue. They often don't even understand it in it's entirety...the bullying and/or the technology. However, I think students need to be included in this solution. Not only from "You shouldn't bully" messages but what should you do if you are being bullied. Students need to know how to handle these situations....this carries over into domestic violence and workplace harassment. People need to know how to protect themselves.
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