This is a depressing article, about cyberbullying. It's timesonline, which means non-Brits may soon lose it, so I'll quote at length:
INCREASING numbers of children are falling victim to cyber bullies, who have adopted the internet as their preferred weapon of humiliation and abuse.Police experts and children's charities are concerned at the increase of cyber-bullying, which is estimated to have risen by at least 30 per cent over the past two years.
E-mail, text messages and website chat rooms are the new forums for threatening children by stealth, out of sight of parents and teachers, around the clock.
Bullying claims the lives of around 20 teenagers a year and thousands more suffer physical and psychological torment. Charities are voicing concern that this new phenomenon is "growing like wildfire".
In 2001, mobile telephones were among the most popular Christmas presents for children. Since then, cyber-bullying has risen by at least 30 per cent, Kidscape, a leading children's charity, says.
Yet as teachers crack down on abuse in the classroom, police admit that cyber bullies can be harder to identify and quash than their traditional counterparts.
In May Mouth2Mouth.tk turned from an innocent internet forum for local children in Hemel Hempstead to chat into a vicious gallery of hatred and abuse. Within months, one humiliated teenager had tried to kill herself and another had lost all his friends after abusive messages were given out in his name.
Parents and anxious teenagers contacted Liz Carnell, who runs Bullying Online at www.bullying.co.uk, a charity set up to counter cyber abuse.
"It was appalling. There were death threats, racist messages and threats of violence. So I spent an entire weekend answering all the messages and telling the abusers the damage they were doing," she said.
Cyber bullying began, Ms Carnell believes, after children were given mobile phones for Christmas in 2001. Initially, they made silent phone calls, but since then the abuse has transferred increasingly to public humiliation on the internet.
And so on.
If this is true, then it is of course depressing. If it is being exaggerated, and if actually bullying on the Internet is intrinsically easier to avoid than bullying face-to-face in a school (my suspicion), then that too is depressing. Expect (as David Carr would say) lots of internet regulation "for the sake of the children".
My strong belief is that bullying happens when there is no escape from it. It happens, that is to say, when it can. In a well ordered and intelligent world, bullies cannot bully, because their victims just go away. If the bullies as a result take over a space which is not theirs, the owner of it then chucks them out, if he has not done so already, and if he has any concern for his own interests.
And my internet-ignorant guess is that cyber-bullying is at least greatly intensified by the existence of social systems where escape is not possible, i.e. schools where attendance is, if not legally compulsory, at the very least extremely difficult to get out of.
After all, if you cyber-bully someone, but never actually meet them to deliver, and to share with your sniggering cohorts, those all-important lines that go: "What are you talking about? – Miss, I don't know what he's talking about – What have I done? – He's shouting at me for no reason", why bother? Cyber-bullying, in other words, only really works if combined with the old-fashioned, pre-Internet kind.
But I'd love to hear from people who know more about the nuances of the Internet than I.
I'm sure that it is indeed backed up by the old-fashioned kind of bullying. Internet threats are scary because people might carry them out. But they can be very intrusive and difficult to get away from, once someone from real-life knows how to send you messages on the net. Children use the internet a lot for various things nowadays, including talking to their friends, and even if you switch it off, once you know there are people out there trying to get you, most of the damage has been done. Modern bullying succeeds not by killing people but by making them so miserable and scared they kill themselves instead.
It's a kind of terrorism-for-kids, and I for one think it is getting worryingly worse in certain social strata marked by the total absence of any rules or morality other than the laws of the jungle.
You could get rid of 95% of all bullying by making parents aware that school is optional. Bullying is a by product of institutionalisation, take away the institution, take away the bullying.
I'm sure cyber-bullying does happen, you only have to look at the comments in any reasonably contentious post on a Blog or on Usenet to see the agressive behaviour which surfaces with depressing regularity. Obviously its easier to avoid than the real thing (but not I suspect text and e-mail - especially if an official e-mail address is targetted) but if the group is one where you want to be because the topic is interesting/important to you then you have to be able to face it down - and younger people - even some older people - may not have the ability/confidence to do so.
I'm not sure what the answer is however - it certainly isn't more regulation though.
Not that I'm claiming one person's experience is conclusive, but when my daughter saw a report of this on Newsround (the first time either of us had seen mention of it) she, without prompting, said she "no way believed" that a third of children had suffered from it. She said she'd never heard of it happening.
Unfortunately cyber bullying is one more weapon in the school bully's arsenal.
It isn't usually carried out on its own but is generally part of a larger campaign including name calling, exclusion and violence.
There's something particularly humiliating about a young person being named in a forum, with their school and year given too and then for people to be invited to make abusive comments about them.
The original mouth2mouth forum included a death threat and other threats of violence.
We used to get large numbers of complaints about text message bullying. In recent months we've had other hi-tech issues like someone being upset and then having their picture taken and emailed to classmates, numerous instances of web pages set up to abuse individual children and by far the largest, complaints from parents and pupils about internet forums.
The police don't have the manpower or resources to investigate all these complaints, although they do amount to harassment, so we're happy to try to shut these websites down where we can.
That can often end the problem quickly.
