What can we, as parents, do to stop cyber bullies?
Published 1 year, 8 months ago in My life.As a parent of two teens the capabilities of digital technology scare the hell outa me. The news this week of the tragic suicide of two Upwey teens begs the question what can we do to help our teenagers cope in a world that we adults are struggling to keep up with. While children are embracing a whole new way of communicating, parents on the other hand are caught up in a different web - trying to keep on top of things while working longer hours, and spending less time at home. The appointment this week of Victoria Police’s first cyber cop is heartening but families - the strongest influence in a child’s life - have to get internet-savvy. Bullies are always going to find ways to pick on their prey but it is a lot easier when kids have one hand on a mobile phone and the other on a computer mouse. My 14-year-old suggested that bullies be charged and fined. Maybe that’s one way. But at home I think the parents need to get up to speed on what their children are looking at. We place restrictions on how much TV they watch, what time they go to bed, how much pocket money etc. Internet use has to be another of those activities to negotiate with teenagers. In our house MSN is allowed three times a week for 30mins. And they are not allowed on when I am not home. We’ve talked about what gets said and what is and is not appropriate. What else can we do?
4 Responses to “What can we, as parents, do to stop cyber bullies?”
- 1 Trackback on Oct 17th, 2007 at 6:19 am
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Computers in the family rooms not the bedrooms and no cameras are recommended to parents who are trying to maintain internet boundaries for their kids.
I agree with golden1… computers in family rooms is a good policy, as long as parents don’t jump every time they see something on the screen (e.g. kids friends may off-handedly swear in a chat session, or sometimes ads featuring bikini-clad models appear). No kid wants to be banned from the internet because of something that happened by accident. That would paint the parents as unpredictable and unreasonable, and make kids want to hide even the most innocuous internet activities if there’s a tiny risk of getting a dreaded internet ban. If you see something you don’t like on the screen, talk about it with the kids before reacting - often there are perfectly reasonable explanations.
Many websites/communities have anti-harassment policies, administrators and moderators who kids (or even adult members) can go to if they are being bullied or harassed. Perhaps ask your kids if the sites they are a part of have these?
At the end of the day, the best thing is to do exactly what you’re doing - talk to your kids, keep communication open, and prepare them attitude-wise for situations when their access to the net may be unrestricted. If kids have a strong sense of what is inappropriate or not, then even without anyone looking over their shoulder they are less likely to go into it.
On a personal note, I have found the internet a wonderful place where people can be who they are (however weird that may be), and not be alone. The internet is a place of communication, acceptance and hope that has opened the trapdoor leading out of depression for me. By doing things that my parents didn’t initially approve of on the internet (using online dating), my life, both online and offline, has become so much happier and more interesting. And because my parents taught me how to be safe in meeting people from the net, nothing bad has happened because of it.
When two local Australian high school teenagers and My Space enthusiasts, Stephanie Gestier and Jodie Gater, were found hanging by their necks from a tree down the road from us, the buzz word EMO began informing those of us over 30 of the sad plight of these emotionally sensitive, passionate creatures. It was within days of the Virginia shootings in which a student killed 33 people on his college campus. In a world where notoriety is the new status, was this co-incidence? Why did these teens so obviously post your their own cryptic and teasing RIP type messages on public chat rooms? And why declare one’s depth of love for others the day before killing oneself if one didn’t have enough caring for oneself to avoid the compulsion to commit this group suicide?
Like the goths of the Victorian era, EMOs indulge in passion like chocoholics indulge Tim Tams. They drip with melodrama and pathos. When criticised that their pain is not genuine but contrived they match this with ‘evidence’ provided by often bravado-related self harm episodes and progressive self isolation which they claim are expressions of the depths which others don’t understand them or care.
Emotional blackmail is part of the process and comes with the territory. Because those indulging the EMO thing are so invested in the associated status and power of their self harming roles, gaining them professional treatment can sometimes mean they are compelled to make themselves so ‘deeply pained’ as to prove ‘treatment resistant’. In the EMO heirachy the person proving the deepest, most genuine, most urgent pain, becomes the focus, the buzz, of the group, so climbing that heirarchy means one must be prepared to be pretty ghastly to oneself.
Clearly reminding them that many children in third world countries are dying of malnutrition, AIDS and facing child labor and prostitution isn’t likely to rock their boat because you’re only offering them an opt out of the heirarchy. Why should they take that opt out, its a game and they intend to move from dabblers to be key players if not ‘winners’. Ultimately, the highest proof of how genuine their pain supposedly is, the way to reach that star position, is suicide.
But this passion is not a passion for happiness, its a passion for self pity and an almost religious, self-hypnotic group reinforcement that ‘life is pain’ and that nobody understands an EMO like another EMO. Hence, they turn to chat rooms to support each other, play ‘rescue me’ and ‘poor me’ mind games with each other and themselves, and tease each other into ‘learning the truth’ or ‘confessing’ to their latest slash, jab, burn or overdose episode.
Like all addictive and obsessive-compulsive indulgences, there are emotional fixes people get bleeding their hormones for seemingly endless sappy emotion to bathe themselves in, getting high on the promise of an audience, a rescue or the ‘dirty little’ secret ‘nobody knows’ that they are a self harmer and everyone is going to remember them with such deep sorrow, so deep, so passionate, exactly as the EMO culture itself would dictate.
But EMOs aren’t conformist, are they? How could they be? They’re goth, punk hybrids. These were hardly conformist movements. Think again. Conformity isn’t a world of conservatism. Conformist-nonconformity is a global phenomenon as authoritarian, dictatorial, and stuffed with its own inherent potential stigmas for any who dare the real individuality to say ‘it gets old’, to give up such stuff for real individuality. And individuality, true individuality, is one of the lonliest of life’s paths.
Real eccentrics, not the personality transplanted version who mindlessly conform to the dictates expectations of subcultures are hard if not impossible to categorise. These days, no pigeon hole, no group, no group, no ‘friends’. Well, at least that’s the assumption. But does a bunch of anonymous strangers clicking a button to introduce themselves really amount to an internal feeling of achieving friendship? What if you thought it did? What if your subculture convinced you this was the real deal and all there was? Would you dare question the obvious emptiness? And if you did would you use that as ammunition to further wallow in self pity or as a prompt to do something more constructive?
It’s always very PC after events like this, to do the grieving and presume undiagnosed depression. But are we open minded enough to look beyond our sugaring of such events and see self-murder, exhibitionism and cult-like group mentality, even culturally promoted personality disorders? If we really feel that these two deaths were such a tragedy then lets honour them not with the pity that the culture addictively seeks, plies for and indulges in, but with understanding.
… Donna Williams
www.donnawilliams.net