Hot Button: Bully Pulpit

Bullies have moved from the schoolyard to cyberspace—and the consequences can be tragic. Can Seattle Public Schools’ new curriculum curb these vicious attacks? 

During the summer of 2005, Callum Dickson, then 14 and a student at a Kirkland school, refused to go along with friends who wanted to bully a classmate. To his surprise, Dickson became a target of cyberbullying. “It happened out of the blue,” says the 18-year-old Dickson, recalling the time when he logged on to the social networking site MySpace and found a “We Hate Callum” group. “The online bullying was not just confined to MySpace,” says Dickson’s outraged mother, Stephanie Dickson, “but text and verbal messages as well.” As the harassment persisted, Dickson pleaded with his parents to let him change schools. Though reluctant at first, they eventually agreed to a transfer to BEST High School, also in Kirkland.

This is just the kind of incident that Seattle Public Schools’ new cyberbullying prevention curriculum for middle school and junior high school students is aimed at tackling through education and awareness. Today, cyberbullying affects more than 30 percent of students across the nation, according to the Pew Research Center. Cyberbullies act by sending threatening emails, posting damaging photos of others online without their consent, and spreading hurtful rumors on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The abuse may be an extension of something that’s already going on at school or it may be carried out entirely online. It’s especially ominous because it can occur 24/7. And because it exists in cyberspace, it can haunt and taunt forever.

While cyberbullying doesn’t discriminate between genders, girls are more likely than boys to be the cyberbullies, according to Seattle Police Detective Malinda Wilson, who is part of the department’s Internet Crimes Against Children Unit. Teenagers who are more transparent with their online identities are also more vulnerable than those who are less active online. And students with low self-esteem or those with little or no support networks are more likely to be targeted. Dr. Sameer Hinduja, a national expert in the expanding field of cyberbullying and co-author of Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying, notes that the immense social pressures of the early teen years leave this group more susceptible to cyberbullying. “Middle school is a very difficult, impressionable time when youth are figuring out their boundaries, beliefs, goals and roles,” he says. “They are tremendously susceptible to harm stemming from peer harassment, offline and online.”

Gina Gerlitz, who teaches eighth-grade language arts and social studies at Hamilton International Middle School in Wallingford, knows how ubiquitous cyberbullying is. “[Students] combat the whole bullying thing on a daily basis, and if they don’t have the tools to deal with it appropriately, it’s a cycle that’ll repeat itself year after year,” she says. A seasoned educator, Gerlitz has embraced the district’s recent cyberbullying prevention curriculum rollout, one of the first of its kind.

The brainchild of Mike Donlin, senior program consultant for the district’s prevention-intervention department—committed to creating safe and secure learning environments—the cyberbullying prevention curriculum is a treasure trove for teachers like Gerlitz who hope to arm middle and junior high school students against the insidious and rising tide of cyberbullying.

Donlin says the need to add a cyberbullying component to the district’s existing Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) became apparent in 2004 when he was training teachers and administrators in OBPP, which is aimed at reducing bullying problems and improving relations in all district schools. “[Cyberbullying] became such a pervasive undercurrent that I realized we had a problem,” he says. While working with different school teams, says Donlin, the “Internet stuff” kept resurfacing. “It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to deal with because adults, by and large, don’t enter the cyberworld.”