This excerpt from the bully, the bullied, and the bystander gives some tips to prevent bullying.
Caring Schools
- Gather information about bullying at school directly from students.
- Establish clear schoolwide and classroom rules about bullying
- Train all adults in the school to respond sensitively and consistently to bullying.
- Provide adequate adult supervision, particularly in less structured areas, such as on the playground and in the lunchroom.
- Improve parental awareness of and inolvement in working on the problem.
Although these tips are useful for the prevention of bullying in school they don’t translate to the online world that students inhabit. Tip #4 makes it clear that less structured environments need more supervision. The internet is potentially the most unstructured environment that students have access to. The nature of social media makes it difficult for teachers to intervene in bullying. The internet is often a lawless, ruleless place that parents don’t know much about and teachers can’t intervene in. The internet is like the wild West for bad choices and harmful behaviour. Showdowns between students can happen with parents and teachers completely unaware until the real life aftermath comes to the surface. Students can bully each other online and often anonymously. When students feel that they are anonymous all bets are off and students whom you wouldn’t expect to be socially aggressive in person can suddenly become the harshest of bullies.
There are a few things in the video in particular that piqued my interest.
- Firstly the bully is described as being ‘infected’ and hosting the virus. In some ways this makes her a passive recipient and removes some of the responsibility from her. An interesting perspective because although bullies must be held accountable it is important to understand that bullies often need help. Their bullying can sometimes be the result of immaturity, poor choices and can even be seen as a cry for help.
- I also appreciated the inclusion of the english classroom scene. This scene illustrated the very real possibility that this could happen under your watch without even suspecting it.
- This video also reminded the audience that unlike physical aggression and intimidation, social aggression can follow the victim home, there is no hideaway or respite from online attacks.
The video also showed other students standing up for the victim online. I think online it’s easy to be a bystander but this video showed how students can fight back against cyberbullying by publicly posting their disagreement with mean attacks, or anonymously reporting abuse to Facebook.
A few other things that caught my eye were the references to ‘selfies’ and ‘TBH”. Although these existed in some forms when I was in high school the way these posts are used now is quite different.
TBH- or ‘To Be Honest’ posts are chain posts that invite others to post ‘honest’ comments about each other on each other’s walls. Sometimes these posts can be harmless and even nice. Take for example this post I saw on the facebook page of a young family member of mine:
Some students will be lucky to receive positive affirmations like this from friends, others not so much.
As seen in the video, these TBH posts aren’t always nice. The video also showed quite a few ‘selfies’s. These are often pictures young girls are taking of themselves in sexualized poses, little clothing or making pouty faces. Young people are using these pictures to compare themselves to their peers as well as make comments on each other’s physical characteristics.
I think this is a good reminder that the trends in social media are always changing and new platforms like tumblr, snap chat or pinterest can suddenly gain popularity. As an educator it is important to understand that this is the reason why instead of investing time on solely monitoring these sites, it is important to teach students about how to be a good citizen of an online community (don’t share passwords, report anything hurtful, nothing is truly anonymous).