| Saved by the bell! (..but it's cyber-bullies time) |
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| Saturday, 29 July 2006 | |||||
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The necessity to make people aware of this issue is due to an increasing phenomenon registered by the English Anti-Bullying Alliance that carried out a survey based on responses from 92 children aged 11-16 from 14 London schools, the BBC reported in last days . It revealed that one in five pupils has been bullied via the Internet or mobile phones. The English Department for Education asked technology firms to contribute to the campaign whose first step has been publishing the Manual that sets out simple suggestions for schools, pupils and parents to prevent cyber-bullying and eventually deal with it. Hints such as
or
These tips seem to be quite vague, and they could hardly represent an effective countermeasure against this kind of threat, but they are a clear signal about how the Internet is influencing people’s lives, even those aspect that were considered too linked to a “physical dimension” to be likely to be reorganized and carried out through technology. The School Minister Jim Knight, remarks this point by declaring that "No child should suffer the misery of bullying, online or offline, and we will support schools in tackling it in cyberspace with the same vigilance as in the playground. Every school should account for cyber-bullying in their compulsory anti-bullying policies, and should take firm action where it occurs." The lack of a direct contact with the victim and the possibility to remain anonymous, is a further incentive for young harassers who can now act indifferently against other pupils and teachers or members of the staff. For this reason some schools adopted devices to turn technology to bullies: monitoring or blocking software have been installed to detect any offensive phrase circulating on the school network, and services allowing pupils to report bullying by text, were set up. But most of bullies act outside school walls and in spite of praiseworthy measures undertaken by the Department of Education it will be a hard fight, because the behaviours they have to countervail is the expression of a deeper phenomenon involving a cultural change toward a “cyber-culture” that is faster than what we could have ever expected.
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English government is setting about a publication on cyber-bullying in secondary and high schools across the country, in order to help teachers, pupils and families to
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