by Moss
3/17
Below are excerpts from an article from today's SF Gate regarding a Novato girl who changed schools after being "cyber-bullied." It reminds me of the Jen/Gavin/Tourk blog "cyber-bullying" done on Rita's Not a Girl's Kinda of Girl SFist website, including postings by none other than THIS Moss. It just shows that with information and communication tools becoming more ubiquitous, "playground drama," can now be shared instantly and rumors, gossip, drama and innuendo grow at an alarmingly fast pace.
SFGate
School bullies' new turf: Internet
Taunted Novato girl's plight illustrates painful phenomenon
Ilene Lelchuk, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 17, 2007
When 14-year-old Olivia Gardner discovered the "Olivia Haters" Web page that her Novato middle school classmates had posted on MySpace, she was devastated.
They called her "homo" and "bitch" and suggested "kicking her ass."
"I wish she'd just leave Hill (Middle School) and never come back," one girl wrote. Olivia did leave for another school. And she has spoken to groups about how much cyberbullying hurts. But this week the nasty postings and phone calls started again at her new school, her mother said.
Nationwide, more than 4 in 10 teens have been victims of taunts and threats via social network Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, instant messages and text messages from cell phones, a new survey says. One in 8 reported feeling scared enough to stay home from school, according to the survey by the National Crime Prevention Council.
At Washington High in San Francisco in late 2005, someone hacked into the school Web site and posted a student's face over vulgar and mocking images with racist and gang-related captions. And someone recently lifted a 17-year-old Danville girl's phone number and photograph from her MySpace page and posted them on Craigslist in an ad seeking men for sex.
In Olivia's case, the bullying started low-tech, when she was in sixth grade at a public middle school in Novato, said her mother, Kathleen Gardner. When Olivia, who has epilepsy, had a seizure one day, her classmates called her "retard" and dragged her backpack through mud.
It escalated online, and when Olivia switched to Hill Middle School last year, students there started making fun of her within a week because they'd heard from their friends at the old school, Gardner said.
School officials met with families of students involved and held schoolwide assemblies on bullying, and the district installed a filter on campus computers to keep students off networking sites, Novato Unified School District Superintendent Jan La Torre-Derby said.
Olivia moved to a private school more than a year ago and was happy until this week, according to her mom, who said the name-calling has started again and is causing Olivia to have anxiety attacks.
Gardner said she pulled her daughter out of school Monday, at a doctor's suggestion. The mother declined The Chronicle's request to interview Olivia directly, and officials at the school declined to comment, citing student privacy.
Gardner plans to homeschool Olivia and ban MySpace from her computer.
"Olivia would not know what kids were saying about her if she wasn't on MySpace," she said.
How to handle cyberbullying
-- If they don't get a rise out of you, they'll probably stop. So ignore it and especially don't retaliate.
To read the rest of the article click here.
2 comments:
I had heard of cyberbullying at school. I guess the plus side is transparency. You don’t have to guess whether someone has got it in for you. The behaviour has always been there, just that now it seems more invasive when you see it in your own “property”, i.e. a MySpace page. That seems to make it worse because we associate such web pages with our own “land”: in the real world, it would be considered a trespass. Still, it’s nasty behaviour and one wonders why the parents of the bullies aren’t on to it: surely the flip side is that the transparency would allow their folks to find out that their kids are thugs? And Novato is not that big a place.
Jack-
I didn't really think about the plus side, but I agree the lines between the "real world" and the "cyberworld" are gray at best. Novato is not that big, but this could be anytown USA (or the world for that matter). Interesting that none of us want to be on the other end of it, but have NO problem pointing out personality traits in others that we deplore. Also, just wanted to respond to your comment earlier to me about my observations (and yours?) re: sociology expiriment. You hit that nail half-way on the head. To be totally honest, I have NEVER had anything personal against ANY of the players in this (including Jen, Gavin and Lori). This was purely a FUN activity to participate in and I made my comments / jokes / attacks because I could. Please pass this on to your "friends" because I would hate for there to be any bad blood. The bay area is a small place too! Lates.
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