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Bullies grow bolder with new technology
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Bullies at times get laughs, but are not clowns
Debate team members of a school in Bakersfield, California, encased a younger student in plastic wrap and tape in a hotel room before a competition. Four flag football players held down a younger teammate in a Tampa middle school locker room, according to prosecutors, and raped him with a hockey stick and broom handle.
According to a report by the U.S. Education Department and U.S. Justice Department, 32 per cent of students nationwide ages 12 to 18 experienced bullying in the 2007 school year. "The reason it's picking up momentum is not necessarily the frequency of the bullying, but the manner in which people are engaging in bullying," said Joe Braun, a Cincinnati attorney. "It's starting to become more physical, more sexual, and it's not just emotional bullying like we've seen in the past."
But emotional bullying is still raising its ugly head and striking at home. In April, eleven year old Carl Joseph Walker Hoover of Springfield, Massachusetts, hanged himself with an extension cord in the family’s home. This was after he had finally revealed to his mother that kids at school were calling him names, “saying he acted gay and calling him faggot."
A recent study by the University of Victoria (Canada) suggests that children who show signs of depression and anxiety in first grade stand a greater risk of being bullied by third grade. About 70 per cent of the students in the study showed few signs of anxiety or depression over the three years. But 20 per cent did show moderate levels at first, and these intensified by third grade.
Psychology professor Bonnie Leadbetter led the 400 child study. "We need to make these children's lives better in school,” she stated. “If it were a reading disability, we would be all over it by third grade. Because they have problems with social or emotional development or regulating their emotions, we just think somehow they'll grow out of it and they don't."
Technology, that being the internet, now contributes another avenue for the bully to utilize. In some cases the bully is an adult, not another child.
In 2006 thirteen year old Megan Meier was intentionally befriended and then dumped by a person she believed to be her new online friend, “Josh Evans”. “Josh”, who claimed to be sixteen, homeschooled, new to the area, and without a phone, turned out to be the MySpace account of Lori Drew, the mother of a school mate and former friend of Megan’s. Ms. Drew was assisted by her friend, Ashley Grills. Megan had an attention deficit disorder (ADD) condition and was taking medication for depression.
After developing the online relationship, Drew/Grills cut it off by writing Megan through “Josh’s” words, that he “had heard that she was not nice to her friends.” Messages also started appearing on the MySpace bulletin board saying, “Megan Meier is a slut.” Another one read, “Megan is Meier is fat.”
As a result, the thirteen year old hanged herself in a bedroom closet.
Lori Drew, of Missouri, had her sentence of three misdemeanor computer crimes tentatively dismissed in Los Angeles by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu.
How are we addressing the issue of bullying? What needs to be done? Is your child, or one you know, a victim – on either side of the tug-of-war?
To be continued………
For more info: www.canada.com/Life/Anxious+kids+often+targeted+bullies/1770909/story.html
www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/adults/cyber-bullying.aspx
www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/drew_sentenced/
articles.latimes.com/2009/may/19/local/me-myspace19
www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/06/us-school-rape-case-070609/
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