Keeping Your Connections Safe: Cyberbullies

When you were growing up it was the playground bully. These days, kids are facing another kind of bully: the cyberbully.

Like your long-ago playground bullies, cyberbullies work through intimidation. Yet rather than meeting their victims face to face, they engage them via electronic media, such as websites, blogs, email, cell phones and chat rooms.

What is cyberbullying?
Cyberbullying is bullying that takes place through electronic media and involves children, adolescents or teens as both victim and aggressor. Experts agree cyberbullying usually involves four main elements: hurtful behavior, intent to harm, imbalance of power and the repetition of hurtful behavior over time.

Examples of cyberbulling
• Stealing a victim's password and using it to impersonate the individual online
• Publishing a blog to ruin someone's reputation
• Sending viruses to a victim's computer
• Clogging a victim's email account with junk email
• Sending degrading photos through email and cell phones

What can you do to prevent cyberbullying?
Cyberbullying is often an extension of problems children are having at school. However, schools are prevented by law from interfering in student behavior that takes place off-campus and after school.

This is why it is important as parents and guardians of pre-teens and teens to address cyberbullying—both from the victim's and the aggressor's standpoint. Because in the age of electronic media, a bully no longer has to be the biggest, toughest kid on the block. A victim one minute can be an aggressor the next.

Education is a first step in prevention. Kids can become inadvertent cyberbullies through what they consider innocent pranks—e.g., signing up friends for mature websites and e-newsletters. Teach them to recognize bullying in all its forms and to stand up to it.
Also, offer advice on anonymous reporting methods. Websites, community groups and school policing staff can all be used to shut down offensive sites and put a halt to cyberbully activity.

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