The problem of cyber-bullying poses adaptational challenges to individuals and to institutions across a number of spheres. A counterstrategy to cyber-bullying will have to involve preparing at-risk individuals for cyberbullying, and helping them get through and over cyberbullying if and when it arises. The problem needs to named and combated out in the open in schools, youth-clubs, libraries?in all institutions dealing with the young. We also need to harness the power of pop culture, the TV, the Radio and the internet itself to make cyberbullying as uncool and as shameful as possible.
The response will also, obviously, have to have an enhanced and updated legal dimension dealing especially with Cybericide. Cybericide occurs where a person kills themselves as a result of internalising the murderous hate-speech directed against them on a social networking site or other part of the web. Cybericide must be officially legislated for as a new and special kind of multimedia group-crime carrying specific sanctions not only for those who partake in the cybericide but also for those institutions and individuals who, through neglect, allow the cybericide to take place.?
But the law will only take us so far. No crime has ever been abolished by the law. Life?s just not that simple, unfortunately. We have to concentrate even more on prevention, on how to make cyberbullying less likely to occur in the first place, and how to make it less damaging when it does. This means consistent, frontline, face-to-face counter-bullying activities with and among the young.
Dealing with Cyberbullying and it?s evil flower of Cybericide is complicated further by the fact that it is both carried out and suffered, in the main, by the under-eighteens.?
Adult and/or institutional interference in the world of the teenage needs to be very carefully thought through so as to avoid aggravating the issue, or creating new problems alongside or in place of cyber-bullying. It is unlikely that cyberbullying can be repressed or monitored or legislated out of existence by adults. Overall, we need a strategy that co-operates with the young, rather than attempts to control them.?
We shouldn?t be silly enough to try and hide our children from bullying or to hide bullying from our children. We should try instead to help them meet and ride over it when it comes. We need to help our children learn to deal with the real world, rather than the one we wish we were living in. And, in the world as currently constituted, bullying is rather widespread.?
Speaking as a creative writer and performer working in education, I think there is a valuable contribution to be made by exploring all of the issues raised in bullying in an open and creative manner through drama games, role play, rap workshops and the like. Discussing the issue through poetry and storytelling in the english or creative writing class will also help. We are less afraid of and less vulnerable to a known enemy than to a known one.?
My anti-bullying poem ?Because I?m Human?, written to support a bullied 12 year old niece of mine, is being used as anti-bullying tool in many classrooms in Ireland and? around the world. I have also developed a creative-writing anti-bullying workshop suitable for 4th, 5th and 6th class in primary schools, and 1st and 2nd years in secondary schools. Schools can contact me at davelordanpoet@gmail.com for further details.
I can also give talks on how creativity helped me to overcome my own terrible and near fatal experience of childhood bullying.
Poets can help in the fight against cyberbullying and cybericide, but computer engineers have perhaps an even greater role to play. I have a friend, John Costello, who works on, among other amazing projects, developing contained and tailored social networks for exclusive use of one institution such as a company or a university. If each school (or neighbourhood, or youthclub etc) were to have their own bespoke social network it might wean kids off Facebook onto something more human-scale and in the process reduce both the likelihood and the impact of cyberbullying.
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