The truth about cyberbullying
Parents
The key to cyberbullying prevention just might be the parent. Children and teens are often unsupervised on the family computer, know more about technology than their parents or are not taught proper social skills regarding electronic media. As a parent you can help prevent cyberbullying by:
- Supervising your child's use of the computer. If your child has a computer in her bedroom, it's difficult to supervise her. Many experts recommend moving the computer into a family room.
- Learning about the sites that your child visits and what he's doing online
- Encouraging your child to come to you if he is experiencing cyberbullying, or has witnessed it. According to a survey by iSafe.org, 58% of kids did not tell their parents when someone was abusive to them online.
- Being concerned if your child spends excessive amounts of time online or hides the screen when you approach
- Having your child fill out an agreement about safe Internet practices. A sample agreement can be found on WiredKids.org. (This form is courtesy of Parry Aftab, an Internet privacy and security lawyer and creator of the WiredKids Web site.)
- Teaching your child empathy for others
Hinduja advises parents to take a measured approach when dealing with a child's access to the Internet. "The child needs to know that the parent is not going to take away their Internet privileges if they tell them about something bad that's happening. They need to know that the parent is going to respond very calmly and intelligently, and help them without taking away this privilege that is really important to them. Then, of course, the child has to agree that they're not going to do such things as talk to strangers online and so forth."
Children and teens
Students can protect themselves from cyberbullying by:
- Being careful about giving out personal information, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Kids should never reveal an email password, even to a close friend. If a friendship suddenly goes sour, the former friend can use the password to get into the account and impersonate the owner.
- Speaking to a trusted adult if something seems wrong
- Walking away from the computer if harassment starts
- Not replying to bullying emails or instant messages
- Being aware that whatever happens online can be reproduced and spread very easily. Nothing online is ever really private
A few words about blocking abusive emails
Hinduja cautions against expecting too much from "blocking" email addresses or instant messenger names. "You could be on instant messenger being flooded with all kinds of hateful comments and you could block that one sender, but that person could just use another email address or screen name and continue the harassment."
Parents can always notify Internet service providers of abuse, which may or may not stop the perpetrator. Hinduja explains how that works: "When emails travel from sender to recipient, they hop across multiple computers on multiple networks. Each of those computers stamps information covertly on the emails, which we can use to tell the IP (Internet Protocol) address of each and track back to see which ISP owns the IP address of the computer where the message originated. This information is found in the header of the email, and is not usually displayed by default in email programs. If you enable the viewing of header information, you can identify whether the sender was connected to Earthlink or BellSouth or AOL or Adelphia or any other ISP. Once you identify the ISP, you can forward the email — including all header information — to the ISP's abuse mailboxes, which are typically abuse@ispdomainname. For example, Earthlink's abuse mailbox would be abuse@earthlink.net. By doing this you're providing them with evidence of harassment and misuse of their network resources, which violates the ISP's Terms of Service and then they can terminate the account."
"But the perpetrator can always just sign up for another account."
