News & Events

Monday, March 30, 2009
by: Pegeen Hopkins

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you."

Sadly, the familiar schoolyard adage is not always true. When children, even adults, are taunted, humiliated or threatened through e-mail and instant messaging, the damage can be all too real. 

The threat is increasingly common: 42 percent of young people say they have been bullied online and 53 percent of young people admit they have said something mean or hurtful to another person online, according to a study conducted by i-SAFE, an organization dedicated to educating people about Internet safety.

To learn more about the problem, Pegeen Hopkins spoke to Thomas Massarelli, `79/M.A.E. `84/E.D.S. `88/Ph.D. `98, director of Seton Hall's school and community psychology program.

What is cyber bullying? It is when electronic media is involved in harassment. I'm a school psychologist; usually students will give us a hard copy of what has been said online. With the assistance of a student peer counselor, we conduct a mediation session between the students to talk about what was said and the implications of what has been said. Even if the harassment happens in the student's home and continues in school, it is still part of the school environment, and the school is responsible for taking an active stance.  

You mentioned peer mediation. Are these programs successful? It's very surprising, but I see a lot of good coming from peer mediation programs. Often what I hear when I am a part of a peer mediation session is: “I didn't realize that what I said really bothered you.” Students usually listen to other students before they listen to adults so they get information from these exchanges that they wouldn't normally get from an adult or administrator. For the most part it's very helpful, and usually the bullying will stop. 

Has cyber bullying changed the way we view the traditional “schoolyard bully”? It has. Based on my experience, a lot of times students will hold back on school grounds and in person. In cyber bullying, nothing is held back. Because of the anonymity involved, children say more. They feel as if they are immune from being caught or from having to face the person.

Is being bullied in the schoolyard over more quickly than being cyber bullied? 

There has been a lot of research that seems to support that claim. If there is face-to-face confrontation, it is usually dealt with right away; the administration is involved, the parents are called in, and the situation gets resolved.

Cyber bullying can go on for days, weeks, even months, before children report what is going on to professionals. Children can carry this burden of being harassed for weeks with nothing happening. 

Kids have a way of getting to online sites like MySpace and Facebook even if they are blocked by school authorities. They can bypass firewalls, link to AOL in Canada and use other Web sites to gain access to online messaging sites; they have ingenious ways of actually tripping up the system to do a lot while in school. Text messaging is also big. Children send each other text messages through cell- phones in class, so cyber bullying can go on right in front of you, sometimes, without you even realizing it.

What can parents do? It's good to have the computer screen in an open room so that when you're cooking dinner you can just glance over and see what is on the screen. And it's important to make sure children know the people they are e-mailing or instant messaging. Young children must be educated, because they are growing up in this “mediafriends” society.

For older children, parents also have to know about the different blogs and Web sites their kids are visiting. This can be a warning sign that says, “Something is not right.”

One student I worked with had put up poetry on the Internet; one of the poems was very morbid and dark. She shared it with me, and I spent quite a bit of time working with her, making sure she was okay. She was not in a serious situation, where we needed to call 911, but she had certain things going on in her life that she needed to express and have people respond to her about.

The Internet is a good medium for communicating between friends; a student can get back a lot of positive feedback, but it also can be worrisome because you don't always know what's going on. The new media is just another way of getting the signal out that may say “Hey, this kid needs help.” 

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