Louisville counselor: It's 'rampant, vicious'

By Chris Kenning, The Courier-Journal of Louisville
Thursday, December 28, 2006

Doss High School junior Derrick Lawson has seen classmates take cell phone photos of a student being beaten up and then post them on the Internet to humiliate the victim.

Western High parent George Diaz said his daughter, 16-year-old Abby, has received threatening text messages from someone police haven't identified.

And Tom Robbins, the top counselor for the schools of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville, said a school girl was hospitalized last year for depression because of untrue sexual rumors spread via chat rooms and e-mail.

In Louisville and across the nation, bullying is increasingly migrating from the schoolyard into cyberspace, experts, educators and students say.

A national survey of 1,500 fourth-through-eighth-graders by the nonprofit I-Safe, an Internet safety group, found in 2004 that 42 percent said they'd been bullied while online, and less than half had told their parents. More than 20 percent had received mean or threatening e-mail.

The exact number of local instances of cyber-bullying aren't tracked by school districts.

"Cyber-bullying is rampant, and it's vicious," Robbins said. "Too often I'm sitting in rooms with families devastated by it."

Some argue it's not much different than traditional bullying, but the Internet can carry it to a far wider audience and into the homes of students who are targets.

It's also harder for schools to spot or stop, partly because it often happens from home.

"It's difficult to find out about," said Jim Jury, principal of Ballard High School.

One reason for the increase in electronic bullying is that parents often don't sufficiently monitor their children's Internet usage, and more young children are gaining access to technology, officials said.

Surveys from I-Safe show that nearly a third of high school students regularly visit an online chat room, and 29 percent say they exchange personal information with people they don't know.

"I don't think parents are aware of what all goes on," said Susan Lawson, Derrick's mother.

Experts say incidents of cyber-bullying are increasing everywhere, with some serious consequences.

Last year People Magazine reported on a 13-year-old boy from Chesapeake, Va., who committed suicide after being bullied about his weight online via instant messages for months. His tormentors dared him to commit suicide. Before he shot himself, the boy left a message saying that "the only way to get the respect you deserve is to die."

Experts say that while such an extreme example stands out, more common incidents occur every day.

"It's happening all over Kentucky," said Allan Beane, a Kentucky-based author and educator who is writing a book on cyber-bullying and trains teachers and parents in the state.

Beane said that in one recent Kentucky case a girl was videotaped with a cell phone camera using a school bathroom and it was put on MySpace.

"It's a lot of spreading lies and rumors that degrade people, saying they are gay or sexually promiscuous," he said.

Derrick, 16, can give several examples from his school, although he said it has never happened to him.

"With the AOL instant messages, they can send threats to kids, or send mass e-mails" about students, he said.

But Dezare Battles, a 17-year-old Fairdale High junior, said she uses MySpace and the Web regularly and hasn't seen any such examples.

"If you don't know them, you don't have to accept messages," she said.

Cheryl Dolson, a Safe and Drug-Free Schools resource teacher in Jefferson County, said the problem is often concentrated in middle schools. And it's a larger problem in middle-class schools where technology is common at home.

Although it can sometimes be difficult to find out who is behind Internet bullying, some advocates would like to see Web site hosts take more responsibility for monitoring sites.

Meanwhile, local public and Catholic schools are pouring money into training for parents and administrators on the consequences of cyber-bullying. They stress the role parents must play.

Diaz, for example, said his daughter, Abby, who has received threatening e-mails that he has reported to police, must allow him to check what she's doing on the Internet and to examine her e-mail accounts. The same rules apply to all of his children.

"We tell them that at any time we could get on," he said.

Educators encourage children to speak up if they are experiencing cyber-bullying or have witnessed it. Parents should be concerned if children spend excessive amounts of time online or hide the screen when adults approach.

If a child is a target of cyber-bullying, a parent should tell officials at the child's school if it is school-related, and save any messages in a folder. They may be used for documentation. Also, the bully can often be blocked by an internet service provider.

Robbins urges parents to understand the online social networking that is such a key part of teens' lives.

"Don't say, 'I was 13 once,' " Robbins said. "You weren't 13 in this world."