Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying - Sameer HindujaReview: What is the author trying to convey, and what are the primary and secondary points that are ma

Chapter One Bullying: Past, Present, and Future The New Adolescent Aggression

All I saw on Facebook was: “she deserved it . . . I hope she’s dead . . . I hope she dies this time and isn’t so stupid.” I’m constantly crying now. Every day I think “why am I still here?” I’m stuck . . . what’s left of me now . . . nothing stops. I have nobody . . . I need someone. —Amanda, 15, British Columbia *

Amanda’s Story Many girls look forward to their sixteenth birthday with a great deal of anticipation and joy. It is supposed to be such a special day of celebration and even life-long memories. Unfortunately, young Amanda Todd from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, never got to have this experience—in part because of the hate and harassment she experienced online, in school, and in her community. Amanda was a typical seventh-grader who, along with her friends, started using her webcam to meet new people across the nation and world. However, her life turned upside down of her life.

Approximately one year after exposing herself via webcam, Amanda received a message on Facebook from the guy she had flashed. He threatened to distribute her topless picture unless she revealed more of herself to him. This did not seem like an empty threat as her blackmailer told her he knew her address and the names of her family and friends. When Amanda didn’t comply, he did as promised—and Amanda and her family were awakened at 4 a.m. by local police officers who informed them that the picture was being distributed across the Internet. Soon after, it made its way around her school, and she had to deal with malicious taunts and tremendous cruelty from her peers (e.g., “porn star,” “whore,” “slut”). As a result, Amanda developed anxiety, major depression, and panic disorder and started abusing drugs and alcohol. Things didn’t seem like they could get any worse, and so she decided it would be best to switch to a different school in the hopes of moving on with her life.

Sadly, the nightmare was far from over. Her blackmailer (and now stalker) tracked her to her new school, created a Facebook profile with Amanda’s exposed breasts as the main profile picture, and then contacted her new classmates. This led to continued bullying and cyberbullying from schoolmates, which took its toll as Amanda fell into a deep depression. To help cope and to try to escape the endless harassment and persecution, she changed schools yet again.

For a little while, it seemed like Amanda’s situation was finally starting to turn around at the third school. She even met a boy who expressed an interest in her, which lifted her spirits and gave her a new sense of hope. Unfortunately, though, he took advantage of her while his girlfriend was away on vacation. This led to the girlfriend and her friends coming to school to find Amanda to exact revenge. She was mercilessly beaten by some while others stood around cheering, yelling vicious insults, and video recording the incident. In severe mental and emotional anguish, Amanda attempted suicide that afternoon by drinking bleach. Thankfully, though, she was rushed to the hospital where her stomach was pumped to save her in time. In yet another effort to flee from the source of her pain and start over, Amanda moved to a new city. However, social media and smartphones made it easy for the harassment to follow her wherever she went. Her mom Carol has shared that “every time she moved schools [her stalker] would go undercover and become a Facebook friend. What the guy did was he went online to the kids who went to (the new school) and said that he was going to be a new student—that he was starting school the following week and that he wanted some friends and could they friend him on Facebook. He eventually gathered people’s names and sent [the nude content] to her new school” (which included students, teachers, and parents). Such extreme and unrelenting torment led to continued substance abuse and self-harm and ultimately contributed to a decision by Amanda to overdose on her antidepressants—resulting in another hospital stay. All of this, of course, gave her peers even more reasons to bully, reject, and humiliate her. In response and perhaps as a last-ditch cry for help, Amanda created a nine-minute YouTube video in September 2012 to share her anguish with the world. In it, she candidly told her story through the use of flashcards which conveyed how alone she felt. Unfortunately, her situation did not improve, and any help or support she did receive was simply not enough as the bullying and cyberbullying continued.

In fact, individuals left vicious and hateful comments on her video saying that she should have used a different kind of bleach, and tried harder to kill herself. About a month after creating the YouTube video, Amanda decided that there was just no escape for her from the incessant abuse and pain. On October 10, 2012, just weeks before her sixteenth birthday, she successfully took her own life in her bedroom. This story might seem sensationalistic, but it is true. We remember the first time we saw Amanda Todd’s video and how our hearts started to race and our lungs started to tighten because we could empathize with her pain and struggle and yet we felt completely helpless to do anything about it. But in this story, we recognized how a perfect storm of elements came together: a teen desperate to find herself and feel accepted and loved; extensive social cruelty, exclusion, and bullying; and the widespread use of social media as a vehicle for communications and, in this case, a medium to harm instead of help. And so the incidents and outcome—extreme and tragic when compared to most cases of cyberbullying—can serve as both a cautionary tale and a case study depicting how teens can exploit their access to various devices, networks, and apps to hurt others if not educated and equipped with the knowledge they need to responsibly and wisely use them.

Amanda’s story raises a number of important questions. Obviously, we wonder what could have been done to prevent this tragedy. Why are some teens so cruel to initiate the hate and harassment but then continue even as Amanda tried to escape it? What could have been done by Amanda’s friends? How could the school have intervened and dealt with the problem and the aggressors? Would it have mattered? How could they have supported and protected Amanda? What could her family have done to help Amanda cope and outlast the harassment? What about at the neighborhood, community, and even societal level?

Amanda could have been our little sister, our daughter, or one of our kids’ best friends. She could have been someone whose parents are friends of ours, who we barbecue with during the summer. She could have been on the same sports teams as other kids we know and love. It is devastating to think about the loss in this case—how a young, bright, beautiful girl will not be able to live up to her potential because of the way she was treated, and how the world was prematurely robbed of peer harassment situations do not lead to such horrific outcomes, it vividly illustrates what can happen. And every incident we see or hear about involving kids traumatized at the hands of others—regardless of the severity—motivates us in the same way to do all we can about this problem. Because it is not right, and no one deserves to be mistreated. Ever. We are sure you feel the same way.

Traditional (Schoolyard) Bullying

The specific impact of bullying on young people has been studied at great length in the disciplines of counseling, education, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and criminology. Most generally, the term bullying is equated to the concept of harassment, which is a form of unprovoked aggression often directed repeatedly toward another individual or group of individuals. 1 However, bullying tends to become more insidious as it continues over time and may be better equated to violence rather than harassment .

Accordingly, Erling Roland states that bullying is “longstanding violence, physical or psychological, conducted by an individual or a is repeated over time.” 3 Tonja Nansel, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and her colleagues define bullying as aggressive behavior or intentional “harm doing” by one person or a group, generally carried out repeatedly and over time and involving a power differential. 4 Finally, the Minnesota Department of Education states that “definitions of bullying vary, but most agree that bullying includes the intent to harm, repetition, and a power imbalance between the student targeted and the student who bullies.” 5

In January of 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, and the Health Resources and Services Administration, worked with a number of bullying experts across various fields to develop a uniform definition of bullying. Bullying is any unwanted aggressive behavior(s) by another youth or group of youths who are not siblings or current dating partners that involves an observed or perceived power imbalance and is repeated multiple times or is highly likely to be repeated. Bullying may inflict harm.