The article mentioned several steps taken at Strath Haven Middle School and High School to prevent and deal with bullying. According to the article, the middle school devoted three weeks to cyber-bullying earlier this year. I have been thinking lately at how utterly glad I am that cyber-bullying didn't exist when I was in middle school, high school, or even college. When I was in school, people found ways to be effectively mean, but now they can post comments on Facebook, send nasty texts on cell phones, and god knows what else. When I tell people now about my experiences with bullying, I often hear, "Aren't you glad there wasn't Facebook?" Darn right I am.
When I was in school, someone might write something crude about you on the bathroom wall, and perhaps all of your same-sex classmates would see it, but now this crude comment could be posted on the internet! Or one might have passed a note to a friend with something mean written on it, and it may have even gotten passed to someone else, but now this message could be sent to hundreds of people with a push of a button! How frightening is that? I recently watched this TV show where a high school girl was angry at another girl so she stole the girl's phone to forward naked pictures (that the girl had of herself on her phone for some reason) to the whole school. Yikes!
It's not that I'm against advances in technology. I am, after all, blogging. I send many-a-text throughout the day. Although I'm not on Facebook, I see high school friends of mine reconnecting with each other and having fun. But like everything else, there's a dark side.
The article mentioned that while students were being educated about cyber-bullying, they played a game which showed how easy it is to trace online activities to a person, and that one student said that this has been effective in preventing cyber-bullying. So that's a relief. Still, cyber-bullying sounds so overwhelming to me. I am learning more about it, but luckily (so far) not the hard way. I commend adolescents who do not partake in it, because sometimes bullying can be so tempting, and it seems, unfortunately, like an all-too-easy way to do it.
