I was reading our local Community Paper last night and was shocked to read an excert claiming Cyber Bullying in our suburb was a growing problem in our State Schools.

Cyber Bullying if you don’t know, is the use of mobile phone, internet and chat service in particular to bully and harass and intimidate vulnerable kids and teachers by bullies. They use the the protection of the internet to remaim anonymous while they attack a child or adult with verbal or written text messages threatening to hurt them or spead rumours which are not true, but while cause the child or adult to feel bad about tyhemselves.

Some of these attacks are so severe, they cause long term problems, with some of the most severe attacks particularly with teenages, contributing to suicide.

Earlier this week I wrote an article called “50 years of the ABC”. It highlighted a trend within our younger generation of violence, especially towards other teenages. Cyber Bullying as just another violent act targeting vulnerable people especially on the net and mobile phone users. State Schools have noticed a growing trend in pupils becoming more violent, in particular over the internet and text messaging.

I don’t know about you, but pussy footing around and saying we are trying our best to keep internet bullying and text message bullying controled at school. Ban the phone totally if you have to. Ban the use of email and chat serices of any kind at school and have a strict school yard policy, that also bans bullying of any kind.

Get a group of young girls or young men together, and you will see an aliation of anyone that does not mix with these groups. Teachers should encourage and if necessary break up these school yard groups if any sign at all of bullying is shown. Parents should also monitor what their kids are doing with mobile phones and the internet. Based on personal experience with my teenage kids, stopping them from doing something that they wanted to do was often matched with abuse and also anger and violence. However, they could scream all they wanted,  but they were not going to do something or go anywhere unless I knew. But I can sympithise with parents who lose total control of their kids.

We are a society were nearly 40% of parents are single and of those 50% are with kids. Kids rule! And why do they rule? Because society says to them in the form of radio, tv and their peers, that parents are idiots and should not be listened to. Because if you do as your told, you are not cool. And not being cool, just isn’t COOL!

Get a kid with an bad attitude towards authority and you have a kid with self esteem problems. They are not being taught to respect authority, so they learn that an anti social attitude gets them what they want. They feel shit about themselves and hitting out in the form of bullying and anti social behavour is their way of hiding the hurt they feel. I am not saying that this is okay and that this poor child should be able to do what they want. No way! But we have to look at what causes Cyber Bullying and attack the cause.

When I was young, many years ago when a family member was bullied by anyone and I have to say bullying was a very rare thing, the oldest and biggest in our family would pay the bully a visit after school. They would have been pursuaded to change their ways and stop giving our relatives a hard time at school. It worked nearly all the time, but it didn’t stop the bully from attacking another victim and encouraging other kids from joining them to make the attacks even worse.

I am a parent and it sickens me when I see violence everywhere I go. It has to stop and it has to start at school. I have to feel that my kids are safe at school and they will not be picked on by anyone else. They should be able to go to school and be themselves, cool or uncool, it dosn’t matter.

Blaming parents for all the woes of modern society is a load of dog poo. Give us the power to disipline our kids and make it easy for single parents to get the help they need if they feel one or more of their kids is falling off the wagon. If a kid is turning out to be a rat bag, do as my father once did with me. He rang the Police and told them his son was hanging out at the pool hall and shouldn’t be there. They would tell him to relax and they would go and get me. And I have to tell you, a boy of 14 being led away and told to pull my headin by 2 burly cops was just what my Dad needed. I was still a rebel inside with a few authority problems but I never again put myself in a position to be led away by the boys in Blue.

But that sort of support my people with authority are just not available today. Kids rights and social acceptance of Police being involved just would not be tolerated today. But, it used to work.

Cyber Bullying is a problem which is growing. No one will be able to stop it unless the people with all the power really want to stop it. If your kid is being bullied by someone online, there is a way to block this sort of attack. It’s not easy to do, but if your ISP really wanted to do it, they could. It’s call IP blocking. You could set your computer up not to except anything from the bullies computer. And the phone companies are at fault as well. Because they could also give you the facilities to block messages from a particular phone. The technology is there, but the will isnt because if they block a message to your kids phone, thats 25 cents they have lost.

I think as a society we need to get serious about all this anti social behaviour being shown by some of our youth. Tell the kids we will protect them and when they are not with us, we will demand who ever is responsible for them to keep them safe, even if it means that bullies and any kid with anti social behavour is targeted and counceled by an authority.

Authors Note: This article contains spelling errors, read at own risk.

Technorati Tags: Cyber Bullying, vulnerable kids and teachers, bullies, violent act, internet bullying, text message bullying

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Anti Social Behaviour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.