14 DAY TRIAL // It's out of the streets and into our homes. That would be one way to accurately describe the way things are at the moment when it comes to bullying. One from ten teenagers has been subject to it at least once in his/her life, while others have been constantly targeted by nasty email, text messaging and online chat, as US researchers have found out.
The rise in percentage goes up to an astounding 50 percent, compared to the year 2000, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease control and Prevention, from 6 percent to 9 percent of the total number of children aged 10 to 17. "One thing that stands out is that aggression perpetuated with technology goes far beyond cyber bullying," said Corrine Ferdon, one of the authors of the CDC report on "electronic aggression and youth violence."
The latest example of cyber bullying that circled the globe and filled everyone with woe has been that of the 13 year old girl that hung herself with a belt, in November, after exchanging insults with a visitor of her MySpace profile. The last message she received was "The world would be a better place without you" and the person that sent it, allegedly a 16-year-old boy named Josh, turned out to be in fact the mother of a former friend of the girl, who claimed that she only wanted to know what the 13-year-old thought about her daughter. Laws have been passed against this kind of behavior since that time.
Nevertheless, studies showed that 64 percent of the teenagers who said that they were bullied online contended that they were not bullied at school; but, it also showed that kids bullied online are more likely to take guns at school. At any rate, the school officials who restrict access to the Internet and/or mobile phones have gone too far, in my opinion. After all, despite being there, cyber-bullying can be as easily denied with the press of an "ignore" button where available, or with indifference where not. That's the upside of it: if you aren't open to it, it won't come and hit you in the face, like the old school bullying I was used to.