Bullying

[talon]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1978773,00.html

If you don't police this, we will, they declare--a warning aimed at the abdicators as much as the perpetrators. Parents who imagine they can escape the implications of this might want to spend some time clicking through the virtual playground where their children live.

And that's the truth. If parents, the adults in the lives of children, and school personnel don't take responsibility for instilling manners, good behavior, and civility in children, then the laws will try to do so ham-handedly.

Adults are supposed to both teach and protect the children, and right now, we really aren't doing either.

We are allowing our children to grow up in a Lord of the Flies scenario with technology William Golding never imagined. Many children are unsupervised in their use of social networking tools and have never been taught the etiquette involving them. Perhaps this is because a lot of adults either don't know or don't care about social networking etiquette, but at least with children, we can chalk it up to ignorance that is easily correctable.

Carrying the bullying from in person harassment on the school grounds and playgrounds and parks and at shopping malls and other physical venues where children gather to the internet has carried bullying to a new level because children who live in other cities, other states, and even other countries, who've never met the bullied child can join the bullying, magnifying its effects and making it a relentless assault.

The victim doesn't have any respite and doesn't think they have any recourse - especially if their parents are not computer literate and refuse to become so or if they have computer literate parents who don't monitor and supervise what's happening and don't seem to care. If the victim seeks retaliation, they are often the ones punished because the parents and other adults in the victim's life have turned a willfully blind eye to the bullying. The bullies carry on, in person and on line and recruit others to join in the "fun" of tormenting someone else without any responsibility or consequences for their actions. The longer they get away with the bullying, the worse and more intense it becomes.

The parents of the victim may have asked for help, may have reported the bullying, may have even tried to communicate with the bullies - often to the deaf ears of the school and the parents of the bullies.

Sometimes, the victim is blamed for the bullying and told to "suck it up" or that the other children are "jealous" of the victim.

That doesn't help the victim and doesn't stop the bullies.

I don't want to see laws enacted about this because the laws will by their very nature be unjust and indiscriminate, with little or no flexibility for individual circumstances or mitigating factors. And often, the victim will be further victimized by those laws.

I would truly, desperately, like to see this addressed by more responsible parenting, by better adult supervision at the schools, parks, malls, and other places where children socialize, and by better education of adults and children in the use of social networks. Our children need to feel safe and confident about reporting bullying incidents to adults, and those children who are engaging in bullying need to suffer the very real and physical consequences of such actions. Punishments can range from the milder lessons of writing essays, doing community work, spending time monitoring their peers for bullying behaviors (under review and supervision, of course), reciting etiquette rules (Does Miss Manners address this? She'd be a good authority to use if so.) , to the ever harsher restrictions of internet use, visiting the gathering places, detentions, and increasing up to fines and even incarceration for the more egregious bullying.

Let's take control of this now, before the politicians make matters worse in their attempts to control it.