I just found a link to a site called Delete Cyberbullying. It's related to McGruff, the take a bite out of crime dog. The discussion relates to cyberbullying as a teen phenomenon. Okay. I'll allow that cyberbullying has a higher incidence among the teen population by virtue that they are online more than adults and are in chat rooms and using IM far more frequently than adults.
But the age of majority throughout the United States is 18 years. In some states, it's lower. In many states, it should be much higher. Oh, I guess that relates to Emotional Intelligence, which is an entirely different subject and concept altogether. The point is, eventually those teens reach the age of majority and venture into the workforce. As time passes, somehow these former teen bullies manage to stumble and finesse their ways into management positions. However, their bullying habits have traveled with them and been visited on many along the path to today's point in time. Some are now discussion board bullies (whether they want to believe it or not) and some are abusive managers.
Too bad McGruff doesn't have any suggestions about what adults can do to control the destructive patterns of adult bullies. However, they do have a white paper that highlights findings of a Harris Poll study and is called Cyberbullying Executive Summary-2007. That's a good first step. And the full report (Teens and Cyberbullying) is something that will require extrapolation and analogy (of which all we adult professionals are capable) but is well defined and lends us additional explanation of what can be done about our bullies of whatever age.
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Resources on young people's safety on the Internet, including cyberbullying, can be found at Child Safety on Web 2.0: Who Should Protect Our Kids?, Cyberbullying and Free Speech, Cyberbullying, Bullies and Bullying, Additional Resources on Bullies and Bullying, Especially for Young People and Their Parents, Safety Resources for Young People, BlogSafety.com, and Stop Cyberbullying.
Additional information on cyber bullying can also be found at www.cyberbullyhelp.com
Thanks so much for all of these great resources on bullying and cyberbullying. It's important to know where to get information about how to handle this both online and in the real world.
Once we know how to handle it from the safety of our computer, taking that next step to stomping it out in the real world in the context of harassment of any sort becomes easier. And knowing how to handle it effectively is extremely important.
We should not be forced to live our lives as victims. We all have tremendous talents that should be used for the betterment of our social infrastructure.
Thanks so much, Don and Anonymous!
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