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Articles
Shades of Grey: Why some cyberbullying interventions don’t work
Written by Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, Media Awareness Network
Over the last few years, increased attention to cyberbullying and online harassment has made it clear that youth are most at risk from each other online. Most efforts to address the issue, however, have been unsuccessful. Why?
Many of the current cyberbullying interventions take the form of public awareness campaigns that simply tell youth not to be cyberbullies. Not only is this ineffective – a 2008 study showed that interventions of this type failed to change bullying behaviour – but this top-down approach may well make things worse by reducing the content to a simplistic “just say no” message, allowing youth to simply tune it out as they generally do when adults talk at them.
Another communication issue is that the term “cyberbullying” has little meaning to youth. As danah boyd of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society has noted, what adults may describe as cyberbullying, youth are more likely to describe as getting into fights, “starting something” or simply “drama.” As a result, interventions that focus on “cyberbullying” are bound to fail. It’s not just youth that define bullying too narrowly, though: it’s becoming clear that different cases of cyberbullying do not resemble the “classic” bullying scenario – and that, in many cases, the different participants may have quite different views of whether or not bullying is going on.
A dramatic example of this is the Web site Formspring, a site that allows users to send each other anonymous questions. Not surprisingly, when teenagers got hold of it the questions often became abusive, from leading questions about others to simple harassment. Not only were teens using the site to bully each other, but it’s been discovered that many of these abusive questions are written by the same people who respond to them. danah boyd suggests a number of possible explanations for this: that it may be a cry for help, a desire to look cool (by making it look as though people are jealous of you) or to get friends to rally around you. Another possibility is that it’s done to pre-empt bullying by others, to show that you’re a “good sport”: according to a recent study, one-third of youth respond to bullying by making a joke about it and three-quarters pretended it didn’t bother them. Finally, this may be a perverse result of the media attention recently paid to cyberbullying: because of the black-and-white way in which bullying is portrayed, making yourself seem like a victim places you firmly on the high ground.
All of those possible reasons relate, in some way or another, to power and status, and they demonstrate just how much more complicated any form of bullying is than the simple “bully and victim” narrative: it’s not at all uncommon for someone to be the aggressor in one relationship and the target in another, or for those who are being bullied to try to retaliate against their harassers. But power and status make a huge difference in how bullying is experienced: high-status youth tend to have more developed “social intelligence,” which means that they are able to leverage social structures to their advantage. In classroom bullying, for instance, high-status youth often keep their bullying “under the radar” until the target retaliates – at which point the target is usually the one who is punished.
This shows the folly of “zero tolerance” approaches to cyberbullying: there are simply too many different factors for one size to fit all. At the same time, we are failing our children if we simply throw up our hands and say “kids will be kids” or “there will always be bullying.” While it’s unlikely that bullying will ever be stamped out entirely, many of the factors that make it more common or severe can be addressed. For parents, the most important strategy in preventing cyberbullying is to address it before it happens by encouraging our children to talk to us about anything disturbing that happens online and reassuring them that we will not overreact. (One study reported that many victims chose not to report cyberbullying because they feared losing their Internet access.) For schools, the highest priority is the development of empathy. A Canadian program, Roots of Empathy, has had success developing empathy in children between kindergarten and Grade 7 by bringing infants into classrooms and inviting students to try to see the world from the baby’s perspective. The flipside of developing empathy is creating a culture where bullying is not seen as the norm – or rather, where not bullying is seen as the norm. When middle schools in New Jersey found that students overestimated how common a variety of bullying behaviours were, they created a series of posters that showed the actual frequency of these behaviours: as a result, students came to feel that not bullying was a part of their shared social norms. As with Roots of Empathy, this intervention is successful in part because it is done early, before problematic behaviours have had a chance to become ingrained – and before children learn to tune out what we say.
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