Cyberbullying is a School Problem

His classmates guess and guess, but senior Carl Wilson* always knew they were wrong. Whenever a conversation among friends or other students would turn to the identity of SMEGossipGurlz, an anonymous Twitter account that posts East “gossip,” senior Carl Wilson guessed with the masses, developing theories about whom the culprit could be.

Wilson, the co-creator of SMEGossipGurlz, loved to “feed the fire.”

“It was so funny because I would just tell people it was this person or that person, and they would totally buy into it,” said Wilson. “I would just laugh silently inside.”

In addition to SMEGossipGurlz, East students are finding plenty of ways to write about other students anonymously through other fictional Facebook and Twitter accounts. This anonymous cyberbullying is a recent variation of other types of “cyberbullying” that have become been reported more and more by students and parents, according to associate principal Heather Royce.

Of 87 students grades 9-11 at East surveyed during seminar, 35.9 percent said they had been bullied online before; 34.7 percent of that group said they had been bullied online five times or more.

Wilson started his account with a friend last fall. It posts “gossip” such as rumored party mishaps and potential parties; as of press time, it had posted 40 times and had 303 followers. When they started last fall, their goal was to just make people laugh.

“We thought it would be funny if no one knew who was writing it, just ridiculous events were reported on, in kind of a laughable manner,” said Wilson. “Yeah, [getting tweeted about would] be embarrassing, but it’s supposed to be like, ‘Yeah, my antics were reported on.’”

Not everyone feels it is harmless. Sophomore Julie Sanders** was devastated when she was mentioned on a post on SMEGossipGurlz.

“I just remember not wanting to go to school,” Sanders said. “It was like the first week of freshman year, so I didn’t know anyone, and I called [friend’s name omitted to protect identity] crying, ‘What am I going to do?’ You feel like everyone is staring at you…you feel like the whole school is talking about you.”

Anonymous online accounts are only the newest form of cyberbullying, according to Dr. Sameer Hinduja, Co-Director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. Dr. Hinduja has studied cyberbullying–which he defines formally as “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers and cell phones and electronic devices”–for around 10 years and has seen thousands of examples submitted by students.

Along with Co-Director Dr. Justin Patchin, Dr. Hinduja has identified that cyberbullying is tied to loss of self-esteem in the victim, and that victims of cyberbullying are more likely “to have suicidal thoughts and engage in suicidal actions” than those who have not been. He generally describes cyberbullying as kids “being jerks to each other using technology.”

“[When you’re an adolescent] you care so much about peer perception, so what everyone else is saying about you and thinking about you, even if honestly they’re not,” Dr. Hinduja said, “So when there’s gossip or rumor-spreading or name-calling or insults or being portrayed in a negative light on Facebook or in a YouTube comment or something like that, it just takes over your world and it really wrecks you.”

Dr. Hinduja, co-author of Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying, thinks that East’s cyberbullying issue is actually pretty standard for a high school. Often, he says, even when not anonymous, confrontations start small, such as a comment on another student’s picture or “wall”–a feature on Facebook where you can publicly display a comment on someone else’s account–and then escalate.

“It just goes back and forth, and then people take sides,” Dr. Hinduja said, “and then you have this slew of 49 comments and everyone is just going off on everyone else because of their taking sides. It’s just all sorts of drama which is completely unnecessary.”

Junior Reid Frye has been a part of three fictional Facebook accounts, beginning in the fall of last year. The accounts were created to look as if they were students in the area. Four or five of his friends usually would all take control, posting on real students’ walls and pictures.

Frye says that the appeal was being able to say things anonymously, not to bully others. According to Frye, the Facebook accounts poked fun at ideas and groups, not individuals. He usually commented on friends’ walls or pictures. Sometimes, he would also comment on the walls or pictures of “people who would probably beat you up if you said the stuff that you said to them [online] to their face.”

“It’s not like the idea of heckling people,” Frye said. “It’s just the idea of being able to say stuff that you wouldn’t say normally, just on someone else’s name.”

However, should a student feel like they are “cyberbullied,” the Shawnee Mission School District already has rules in place for administrators to handle it. Grouped with traditional in-person bullying, cyberbullying is defined by the district as “bullying by use of any electronic communication device by means including, but not limited to, e-mail, instant message, text message, blog, cell phone, pager, online games or websites.”

The District Guidelines give the administrators a range of actions to take. The guidelines say that a first offence could range from a conference with student or parent to a short-term suspension. Repeated offences could result in an in-school or out-of-school suspension, depending on the severity.

The trouble, according to Royce, is catching students. Although she has seen an increase in reports of cyberbullying, it is difficult to prove that it happened “while utilizing school property, on school property, in any vehicle used to transport students for district purposes or at a school-sponsored activity or event,” as the district policy states. She guesses that 90 percent of it happens from home.

“We are always happy to investigate, talk to kids, call parents, just to let other parents be aware, but in terms of suspending a student from Shawnee Mission East because of something he did Sunday afternoon in the privacy of his own home,” Royce said, “the courts don’t look very favorably on that.”

Royce said the problem often stops after an administrator communicates with the bullying student or his parents. However, she also notes that the administrative staff has included the School Resource Officers and filed police reports in the past. The SROs have already dealt with a cyberbullying issue this year, and will often weigh in on the legal process if needed. If a case gets severe enough, according to Royce, the administration may be able to intercede even if it did not happen during school hours.

“The legal interpretation gets a little gray, but even if the posting or the tweeting or whatever happened outside of school, if it truly caused a substantial disruption, that’s kind of the litmus test for when schools can infringe a little on First Amendment rights,” Royce said. “If students were in such an uproar that it was interrupting class time and students were fighting in the halls, I think we would have a case that it was causing a substantial disruption and take action.”

Royce also suggests ignoring any potential cyberbully unless the comment is truly trying to intimidate, bully or threaten someone else. She especially sees ninth and tenth graders as “incapable of not responding.”

“So many of these things start off as just a snotty comment, and that person responds, and the ante gets raised and raised and raised until it becomes really heinous and vile,” Royce said. “If you know the first time somebody sent somebody a message or a text or a post or whatever, if that person deleted it and unfriended that person…I think a lot of it would go away.”

Even without administrator intervention, the anonymous accounts usually fizzle out. Frye says most of his accounts end once people start to figure out who it is. Wilson let a few people know that SMEGossipGurlz was his this summer; now, he guesses half the school knows it’s him. He even took down one of his posts after a student threatened to have their parents sue him for slander.

“I think it can be interpreted as cyberbullying, but I didn’t set out to hurt someone intentionally or like really, really mess with their head,” Wilson said. “It was more just like for the comedy. If someone did something similar to me, I wouldn’t be that upset–I’d just get a laugh out of it.”

To help end cyberbullying, Dr. Hinduja is working to change the perceptions of it among high school students. It helps, he says, that people who cyberbullied around a decade ago are now seeing the future ramifications.

“We’re seeing more and more often that kids are kinda getting screwed in the future based on their digital reputations,” Dr. Hinduja said. “You’ve gotta be really careful, because you don’t want to come across as a cyberbully and then have that always kind of attached to your name as you move forward, because people are going to Google you and people are going to find you online and it’s really going to affect how people judge you and the opportunities that they give you.”

He also is working to change “prevailing mentalities” that create the right atmosphere for cyberbullying.

“Maybe a lot of people…[say] ‘bullying, it’s a rite of passage, you just gotta go through it in order to grow up, it’s just part of learning about life,’” Dr. Hinduja said. “The truth of the matter is that’s crap, people should not be jerks to other people and other people don’t have to just receive it as part of a normal way of growing up.”

Dr. Hinduja hopes to find a creative way to get everyone on board against cyberbullying. Creating an atmosphere where bullying is perceived as “not cool” is an important next step that he hopes to take. If the right students jump in the effort, he thinks an anti-cyberbully movement could rise up.

“We just need a core group of kids to really, really become passionate about the topic and see how it is affecting kids,” Dr. Hinduja said, “and then, hopefully, that will enlist everybody else’s help and get them all on board as well.”

The future of cyberbullying may involve more pictures or videos, according to Dr. Hinduja, or even live broadcasts. As phones get more powerful and have more capabilities, he thinks it may be easier for the average person to gather footage where privacy is expected. In the end he hopes that, much like some social networking websites become unpopular over time, that cyberbullying will come to an end.

“I wish people would just take a step away from it and realize that is so juvenile and kind of lame, to be honest,” Dr. Hinduja said. “You’ve gotta have something better to do in your life than to just stir up more drama and be drawn to the drama and forward it around and talk about it.”