Rethinking Bullying: Kids Don't See It As Bullying

from the talking-past-one-another dept

For years we've talked about all the silly overreactions to things like the concept of "cyberbullying." In almost every case, it seems like it's just parents simply being incredibly overprotective concerning kids disagreeing with each other -- and the "solutions" they always seem to pose either seemed so off-base as to be ridicule-worthy, or so heavy-handed as to be worrisome for other reasons. As an example of the former, we had a post years back, about a self-described "cyberbullying expert" who claimed that kids would listen to her message about how cyberbullying was bad because she had some guy in a Spiderman costume telling them about it. And, for the latter, we've got all the ridiculous attempts to criminalize being a jerk online, such as in response to the whole Lori Drew incident.

Danah Boyd, who actually studies social interactions online among young people, recently put up a fascinating post about how kids and adults seem to totally talk past each other on these issues, in large part, because kids don't think of these things as "bullying."

When I first started interviewing teenagers about bullying, they would dismiss my questions. "Bullying is so middle/elementary school," they'd say. "There's no bullying problem at my school," they'd say. And then, as our interview would continue, I'd hear about all sorts of interactions that sounded like bullying. I quickly realized that we were speaking different languages. They'd be talking about "starting drama" or "getting into fights" or "getting into my business" or "being mean." They didn't see rumors or gossip as bullying, regardless of whether or not it happened online. And girls didn't see fighting over boys or ostracizing one another because of boys as bullying. They didn't even see producing fight videos as bullying.

So then I started asking them what bullying was. What I learned was that bullying was when someone picked on someone or physically hurt someone who didn't deserve it. I'd ask how they knew if someone deserved it and the response was incredulous, "oh, you know." So I pushed harder... "what if you don't know?" I asked. I got blank stares so I took a different tactic. "What if someone's messing with someone and that other person thinks they're being mean?" This got their attention, but not in the way that I expected. Most told me that you know when someone is messing with you and that if you don't, you're stupid. Besides, when someone's messing with you, you can't take it seriously.

The real issue, Boyd suggests, is not that "bullying," is a problem. It's a lack of empathy. And, of course, that goes way beyond kids. As she notes, "just ask any marital therapist who's trying to help a couple work through their relationship." From there, she points out that these interactions really aren't all that different from adult interactions:

When I look at how teens hurt each other, I can't help but also see how they're developing training wheels for future relationships and reflecting normative behaviors that they see around them. I hear teens' dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight -- with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they're witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn't pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements.

Boyd isn't quite sure how to deal with this, but is right that this appears to be a much more productive way of looking at the "issue." In thinking about this, it seems like rather than trying to do the impossible and "stopping" people from acting like jerks, a potentially more effective way of dealing with this is trying (if at all possible) to use those kinds of interactions as learning experiences.

There's a great quote, apparently by Ian Percy that "we judge others by their behavior, while we judge ourselves by our intentions." It's really accurate, and highlights the difficulty of having empathy in such situations. People never think that they are in the wrong -- and since they can't readily understand or know the thought process and intentions of others, it often leads to them thinking the worst. If there were better ways to get people to at least recognize that others might also have good intentions, it could at least limit the negative impact of some interactions. Such fights and misunderstandings will never go away. It's probably wishful thinking to even imagine they can be decreased even slightly. But calling them "cyberbullying" and outlawing jerky behavior or doing silly costumed song-and-dances isn't going to help matters at all.

Filed Under: bullying, empathy

Student's Off-Campus YouTube Bullying Of Another Student Protected Free Speech

from the oh,-we-still-have-that? dept

There's been a lot of talk and hype about "cyberbullying," these days. There's no doubt, of course, that school bullying is something that many kids have to deal with, and it's not enjoyable at all. In the age of the internet, of course, that bullying can not only be more intense, but it can go much further than it used to, following you into your home and being exposed to a much wider audience. And yet, it still feels like some of the moral panic around "cyberbullying" is blown totally out of proportion. The fact is, some people out there are going to be jerks, and part of growing up, unfortunately, is learning to deal with jerks. That doesn't make it a good experience, but you simply can't outlaw being a jerk, no matter how hard you try. In fact, one of the things that's missing in so many of these discussions about "cyberbullying" is the First Amendment, which protects speech you don't like, just as much as the speech you do. Now, obviously, it is possible to go over the line, into a threat or causing real harm, but we do need to be careful not to get so over-protective that we forget that even most jerky behavior is protected free speech.

Thankfully, some courts still remember this point. Michael Scott points us to a recent ruling about a student who was suspended from school after she posted to YouTube a video of herself and some friends making fun of another girl at school. The student argued that the suspension was a violation of her First Amendment rights, in particular because the speech was done off-campus (something that's come up a lot in various school suspension cases). The court ruled that schools can discipline students for off-campus activities but that they need to be aware of First Amendment rights, and in this case, the student's actions did not rise to the level necessary to take action. The court cited the famous Tinker v. Des Moines case, which is the seminal case when it comes to student free speech issues, noting that while this video may have been mean, it did not rise to the level of creating a "substantial disruption."

Filed Under: bullying, cyber bullying, first amendment, free speech

Parents Not Responsible For Kids' Nasty Facebook Posts

from the computers-are-not-dangerous-weapons dept

Last year, we wrote about yet another misguided lawsuit filed about activity on Facebook. Apparently, a group of students at a high school in New York set up a private Facebook group which, in part, was used to make fun of another student (though only six students were members). The student who was the target somehow discovered the postings and sued the classmates for libel and sued the classmate's parents for not controlling their kids. She also sued Facebook, though it had an easy Section 230 out and was quickly dropped from the lawsuit. Thankfully, the judge has now dismissed both claims, noting that while the Facebook comments were "puerile attempts by adolescents to outdo each other," and while they displayed "an utter lack of taste and propriety, they do not constitute statements of fact," even though they made some factually false assertions. As the judge noted, even though they made such assertions no reasonable person would believe it. Perhaps my favorite part of the judgment:

A reasonable reader, given the overall context of the posts, simply would not believe that the Plaintiff contracted AIDS by having sex with a horse or a baboon or that she contracted AIDS from a male prostitute who also gave her crabs and syphilis, or that having contracted sexually transmitted diseases in such manner she morphed into the devil.

Indeed.

Perhaps more importantly, the judge totally dismissed the idea that the parents were somehow responsible for the kids' postings since it would require parents giving kids a "dangerous instrument" to make them negligent. The judge noted that it is ridiculous to conclude that a computer is a "dangerous instrument," and thus there is no parent liability here:

To declare a computer a dangerous instrument in the hands of teenagers in an age of ubiquitous computer ownership would create an exception that would engulf the rule against parental liability.

The judge notes that this case may involve "cyberbullying," but thankfully New York has no anti-cyberbullying laws, so being a jerk online may still be childish, but is hardly actionable legally speaking.

Filed Under: bullying, defamation, facebook groups, parental responsibility
Companies: facebook

Should Schools Be Involved In Disciplining Students For Off-Campus Bullying?

from the cyber-or-otherwise dept

The NY Times is running a long article looking at one of the favorite moral panics of the day: cyberbullying. The specific article questions how schools should be dealing with the issue, especially when it comes to activity that takes place entirely off-campus. The article actually focuses a lot of attention on the middle school principal we wrote about a couple months ago who sent a long email to parents telling them to ban all social networking from their kids -- effectively taking the "head in sand" approach to dealing with these issues. To be fair, in this article, that principal comes off as a lot more reasonable, initially telling angry parents that off-campus activity really is outside of the domain of what the school should be involved in.

In reading through the article, though, part of what struck me is that it seems like some parents are simply trying to get the school to act because they're unwilling to act themselves. Take, for example, this exchange towards the beginning of the article:

Punish him, insisted the parents.

"I said, 'This occurred out of school, on a weekend,' " recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. "We can't discipline him."

Had they contacted the boy's family, he asked.

Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

What about the police, Mr. Orsini asked.

A criminal investigation would be protracted, the parents had decided, its outcome uncertain. They wanted immediate action.

In other words, there were plenty of paths that the family could have taken, but they didn't want to actually do anything. They wanted the school to act as parents for the kid because they were unwilling to do so. That's not to say these things don't create difficult situations, but it seems like a weak solution when parents just punt the issue and demand that schools handle it. And, of course, the article also highlights cases where parents also get (reasonably) upset when schools punish their kids for off-campus activity.

It's no secret that kids can and will be mean. And with modern communication technology it's easier for kids to be mean directly more often and in much more public ways. That's a challenge, to be sure, but asking schools to handle those issues doesn't seem like an effective or an efficient solution.

Filed Under: bullying, parenting, schools

California Court Says Online Bullying Is Not Protected Free Speech

from the first-amendment? dept

There have been plenty of efforts to try to curb "cyberbullying," often through laws that try to make it illegal to be a jerk. Unfortunately, the concept of cyberbullying is so vague that this creates tremendous problems and unintended consequences. And, on the whole, it seemed unlikely that any such law could withstand First Amendment scrutiny. However, it appears that the First Amendment isn't always the First Amendment we thought it was.

A California appeals court has ruled that cyberbullying threats are not protected free speech. Now, you can understand why people might like this conceptually. No one likes a bully. But making it against the law to bully is incredibly risky, and almost certainly leads to a very different kind of bullying.

In this particular case, a kid set up a website about himself, and his fellow students posted comments mocking him. It was cruel, though you would think that the simple response would be to take down those comments. Instead, the family went to the police -- who said that the comments "did not meet the criteria for criminal prosecution and were protected speech." The family followed by suing six students and their parents for hate crimes, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Now, there's no doubt at all that the comments were over the line and incredibly mean. However, it looks like there was a perfectly reasonable process outside of the courts to handle this. Apparently, the father of one kid who made some of the worst comments made his son apologize, grounded him and took away his internet access. It seems that wasn't enough. Those who were sued filed an anti-SLAPP motion under California's anti-SLAPP law (one of the strongest in the country), but the judges said that the text was not protected free speech and thus did not fall under the anti-SLAPP provisions. One of the kids, while admitting his own conduct was over the line, said he was just joking around, and trying to top others in responding to the website. The judges, clearly, did not find the joking to be funny. Indeed, it was not funny, but that doesn't mean you should lose your free speech rights.

One judge dissented and argued strongly that not only was this a mistake, but it would have serious First Amendment consequences:

I share with the majority the view that R.R.'s post, like many that preceded and followed it, was vulgar, nasty, offensive, and disgusting. But, as Justice Harlan wrote in Cohen v. California... although --the immediate consequence of [free speech rights] may often appear to be only verbal tumult, discord, and even offensive utterance[,] . . . [w]e cannot lose sight of the fact that, in what otherwise might seem a trifling and annoying instance of individual distasteful abuse of a privilege, these fundamental societal values [of freedom of speech] are truly implicated.

In concluding that the post was not in connection with an issue of public interest, the majority fails to follow relevant precedent and ignores the substantial evidence that D.C. was a person in the public eye. The majority also creates a broad and groundless exception to the protections of the anti-SLAPP statute, holding that for purposes of the statute, jokes do not constitute communications in connection with issues of public interest.... That is not the law.

It also notes that while the "threats" in questions did seem incredibly distasteful, in context with all the other comments, it seems obvious that they were not real threats:

Reading the sequence of posts from beginning to end, no reasonable person would foresee that any of it would be taken as a serious threat of violence. No reasonable person would believe that (at least) four people were sincerely threatening to take D.C.'s life. Taken together, all of the posts amount to nothing but a lot of adolescent sex-obsessed hyperbolic derision, sarcasm, and repulsive foolishness

In fact, the judge notes that the kid who set up the website didn't seem bothered by the comments, and was apparently more traumatized by his father filing this lawsuit. Maybe the kid should sue his father?

Filed Under: bullying, free speech

Intel Lawyers Again Go Too Far In Trademark Bullying

from the back-it-down dept

Chip giant Intel has a bit of a reputation for being a trademark bully at times, threatening or suing many companies just for having "intel" in their name somewhere -- including a travel agency and a jeans company. Now, before anyone brings it up, yes, as a trademark holder the law requires you to enforce your trademark against infringement, lest it become considered "generic" (such as xerox machines, kleenex tissues, aspirin and other brand names that became generic). But, the key in all of those generic situations was that the use was applied to things that directly competed with the original brand's products. People referred to other tissues as "kleenex" and it stuck. Intel's lawyers seem to go out of their way to find potential infringement where there obviously is none at all.

Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the latest such case, where Intel has sued the operators of the Mexico Watch newsletter, because its domain is LatinIntel.com. Of course, the reason for that is that it is using the commonly accepted abbreviation of "intel" as short for "intelligence." It's common shorthand, especially within government circles, to refer to gathered intelligence as simply "intel." The owners of the site explained this to Intel, and in return were given a boilerplate explanation about trademark law, insisting that since Intel's trademark is so valuable, it still has to stop others from using it -- even if they're in a totally different business, which is an interesting interpretation of trademark law, and one not supported by the courts in most cases.

More importantly, no one is going to look at LatinIntel.com and confuse it for the world's largest computer chip maker. No one is going to look at that site and wonder how come they can't order a Centrino processor. There's simply no confusion at all. Even worse, it appears that Intel's lawyers dragged out this situation far too long. They first contacted the site back in 2007, and the site's owner responded with a clear explanation of why the name was not infringing. Since then, there have been periodic bursts of contact from different Intel lawyers (it apparently seems to change each time), followed by months of silence, before a new group of lawyers starts pestering the site again. Finally, after more than two years of this back and forth, Intel sued Mexico Watch, even though it's not even close to competitive and any "moron in a hurry" (as the popular trademark test notes) would clearly know the difference between a site about Mexican politics and a company selling microprocessors.

Filed Under: bullying, trademark
Companies: intel

Congress Not Yet Willing To Outlaw Being A Jerk Online

from the that-whole-free-speech-thing dept

In the wake of the whole Megan Meier/Lori Drew thing, politicians started shoving each other aside to introduce "anti-cyber bullying legislation" that would outlaw being a jerk. The whole thing was pretty ridiculous. People are going to be jerks. You can't outlaw it. Beyond just the First Amendment issue, the simple fact is some people will act like jerks some of the time. It happens. It doesn't mean that it's good, but that also doesn't mean that you can just outlaw it. Of course, seeing as this is the type of legislation that politicians like to claim is "to protect the children" and gets them in the press, there's always a chance that laws like this get some momentum. Thankfully, it looks like our Congressional Reps. at least recognize what a dumb idea this is. While Rep. Linda Sanchez insists that such a law is needed, it appears that other politicians are not very interested, pointing out the First Amendment issues, as well as the unintended consequences of making such a vague concept a criminal offense.

Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, regulations

Anti-bullying Laws Don't Work Offline; Why Do Politicians Think They'll Work Online?

from the bullying-is-bad,-m'kay? dept

There's no denying that school bullying can be a terrible thing for those who are being bullied. But, in the last few years, the urge to overprotect has gone to ridiculous lengths, including various "anti-bullying" laws (not to mention the silly idea that if Spiderman told kids to stop bullying, they would). Yet, as Eric Goldman points out, a new report notes that there's no evidence that anti-bullying laws actually do anything at all to prevent or stop bullying. It's one of those laws that people want because it sounds good, rather than actually doing anything good. Politicians pass them because who could possibly be in favor of bullying? But the problem is that these laws don't actually do anything, and now there are all sorts of attempts to expand them online where they still won't do anything to solve the problem, but will be used to go after people that prosecutors don't like.

Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, regulations

Texas Politicians Want To Make It A Felony To Create Intimidating Fake Online Profiles

from the if-you-intimidate,-please-be-real dept

The latest in a long line of questionable "cyberbullying" legislation has shown up in Texas, where the legislature has approved a bill that would make it a felony to create a fake social networking profile with intent to "harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten" anyone. Of course, that seems rather broad. Oddly, the article doesn't mention the Lori Drew case (Update: actually, it does mention Lori Drew at the bottom... but says this law wouldn't apply, because it only applies to fake profiles of "real people"), though, it does mention the Tony La Russa/Twitter legal battle, even though it's difficult to think any court would rule a parody profile as being with intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten. Of course, even if the bill is signed into law, Eric Goldman notes that it would likely have trouble surviving much of a challenge, pointing out the oddity of singling out "social networking sites" and (more importantly) the fact that any such law would likely ban all sorts of protected free speech. Still, "anti-cyberbullying" laws are all the rage these days, and politicians want to make sure they can tell constituents that they're out there "protecting the children," so expect to see plenty more of this type of legislation.

Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, fake profiles, profiles, regulations, social networks, texas

What is Cyberbullying Anyway?

from the good-to-know-*before*-the-witch-hunt dept

We've been hearing a lot about "cyberbullying" lately. Cases like the Lori Drew incident have got politicians and teachers all over looking to pass vague new rules and laws (or twist existing ones) to punish behavior they feel is wrong. The problem is, no one really seems to be able to define the term, at least not in a way that really distinguishes it from simply being a jerk online, so it's encouraging to see a paper from a vice president of Stetson University, Darby Dickerson, calling on educators to slow down and define cyberbullying before creating policies about it, though I'm not sure she gets to the heart of the issue. Dickerson observes that people have been using the term often and easily, without any real consensus on what it includes and what it doesn't. In the absence of a generally accepted scholarly or legal definition, she calls on universities to take four steps before creating a cyberbullying policy:

1. consider the types of activity that might be included within the term,
2. consider the type of harm,
3. consider the level of intent required by the offender,
4. determine the extent that it will address off-campus conduct.

This is good advice and Dickerson does a pretty good job of outlining the concerns. She notes that conduct such as "cyberstalking" or "cyberthreats" might be included, while issues of fraud probably shouldn't be, arguing that "not all misconduct that occurs online should be labelled as cyberbullying." She cautions institutions to remember "free speech and related constitutional concerns." She's skeptical of extending the term to include simply being a jerk online, and she questions labeling students as cyberbullies who don't display real malice or hostility. She also raises lots of important questions about what it means to be "off-campus" in cyberspace. Dickerson concludes by urging institutions to clearly define the term before enacting policies, highlighting many important questions that must be answered first.

Yet... Dickerson ignores one major consideration: why have a separate policy for cyberbullying anyway? It seems to me that in order to consider these issues sanely, we need to stop pretending they're separate things simply because we apply a "cyber" prefix to them. What's a "cyberthreat?" How is that different from a threat in general? Is a "cyberthreat" just a threat made online? What if it's made with a cell phone instead? What about a plain old telephone? Yes, the medium must be considered ("you're going to die" is different when shouted in a playground than written in letters cut out of a magazine...), but do we create separate terms or policies for each medium? We do often need to re-examine our laws and policies in the face of new technologies, but it rarely makes sense to have separate "cyberpolicies" instead of ensuring that existing policies are adapted to handle the new technologies. Why not ensure that existing harassment policies cover real harassment that occurs online instead of creating a new "cyberharassment" policy? Without a consideration of the difference between cyberbullying and bullying in general at the heart of this discussion, people run the risk of spending their energy blaming the technology and grandstanding, creating new policies with troubling unintended consequences rather than addressing the real issue, which often may well just be plain old bullying in a new context. The new context can certainly present new challenges that might warrant policy changes, but people should be careful not to get distracted from the issue of bullying just because it has "cyber" tacked onto the front.

Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, regulations