In most debates, the responsibility for cyber bullying appears to fall on the schools or the parents, and to those who are brave, the bullies themselves. But what about bystanders? Should people who watch in silence say anything? Do they have a responsibility to stand up for people who don’t have a voice like this little girl?

In Andrea Bennett’s article, “Bullying in the Digital Age” reveals that approximately 800,000 minors were bullied on Facebook alone in 2012. Cyber bullying has become such a problem, that even hackers are looking for a solution. For example, Henry Leiberman is in the process of making an algorithm that will prevent damaging material before being posted online. He and his team discovered that 95% of comments can be associated with 1 of 6 categories:

1. appearance
2. intelligence
3. race
4. ethnicity
5. sexuality
6. social acceptance/rejection

Another group under the name: Anonymous, are specifically working to stand up for bullying victims on Twitter. They created #OpAntiBully which is a Twitter account that gives lists and links to report abuse. People like this, who are passionate about the subject are the ones who can make a difference. If they can fight to make a difference, why can’t we?

According to Liberty Mutual’s statistics collected in 2011, 77% of  social media users think that parents are and should be made responsible for resolving cyber bullying if their child is involved. 69% of social media users also think that schools should be more attentive and active in stopping cyber bullying. The article continued to reveal statistics such as

• parents are much more inclined to allow their children to have a Facebook or MySpace account before the age of 18
• only one in five (17 percent) parents would allow their child under age 18 to own a Facebook or MySpace account without monitoring their child’s account.
• majority of parents whose children have social media accounts are “friends” with their children on Facebook or MySpace (74 percent)

These statistics came from a survey released by Liberty Mutual’s The Responsibility Project. This project is the company’s campaign to “showcase personal acts of responsibility and daily examples of ordinary people making the decision to do considerate things for strangers.”

But who’s responsibility is it? Does it rest on parents? On schools? On the bully themselves? This debate will more than likely never be resolved. The same question exists with bullying itself. With cyber bullying, you add to the mix: site policies. Should it be a combination of the three? Most schools have anti-bullying programs and most parents probably talk with their children about it. But is that enough? cyber bullying and bullying continue to be an issue today. What else can we do to help?

What about bystanders? What, if anything, are they doing to help?

This week my group and I presented our information and project to our TIC 104 class. We used an app called TweetDeck and had two hash tags that we were tweeting with #ticcyberbullying and a fake cyber bully example being live tweeted with fake characters on the right. Using the #ticcyberbullying tag we posted links to the sites we were referring to and videos that we were showing. We asked the class to follow along. The discussion itself went great! I was slightly surprised to see how many people in the class are actually very passionate about the matter.

The conversation led fairly quickly into the federal and state laws. As mentioned in a previous post, there are no federal laws against bullying in general and only 19 states have laws for cyber bullying. Several states give credit to schools for taking preventative measures. But should this responsibility rely solely on the schools?

In my opinion, those who are passionate about the subject are the ones who can help change. Will cyber bullying ever go away? Probably not, but we can do our best as individuals to prevent it as much as possible.

Continuing with research into cyber bullying, one question that came up is what is doing to prevent it and are their laws against it? I first decided to look into federal laws. As of February 2014, there are no federal laws against anti-bullying. A cyberbullying law was proposed in 2009 along with criminal sanctions by Linda Sanchez (CA). She introduced a bill to Congress (Committee on the Judiciary) that was referred to as “Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act.”  The Act proposed the following facts/findings:

• ⅘ children aged 2-17 live in a home with internet access
• those on social networking sites are more likely to be targets
• electronic communications give anonymity to the perpetrator and allow for widespread distribution which makes them severely dangerous to youth
• online victims are associated with emotional distress and other psychological problems
• cyber bullying can cause psychological harm including depression, negative academic performance, safety, lead to violent behavior (murder/suicide)
• 60% of mental health professionals report having treated > 1 patient with a problematic internet experience in the previous 5 years (54% of clients were under 18 years of age).

The act proposes amending Chapter 41 of title 18 of the US code by adding:

(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

(b) As used in this section—(1) the term communication means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; and (2)the term electronic means means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.

The current status of the Act is that it died after being moved to a committee. However,  some bullying “laws” overlap with discriminatory harassment which is covered under federal civil rights laws enforced by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Since I didn’t have much luck at the federal level, I decided to look at the state laws. Of the fifty states, Montana is the only has no laws against bullying at all. Of the 49 states that have bullying laws,19 include cyber bullying, 48 include electronic harassment (Wisconsin excluded), 14 have criminal sanctions, 44 have school sanctions, all 49 have required school policies, and only 12 include off campus behaviors.

Overall, it seems that individual states are working on creating their own laws since anti-bullying and anti-cyber bullying laws have not had much success at all at the federal level. I think it’s great that at least most of the states are taking a stand against bullying in general.

Though bullying has been around for years, cyber bullying wasn’t really a term until about the past decade. However, that doesn’t mean that it did not happen. Cyber bullying can be defined as using electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. Compared to face to face bullying, technology and sites such as chat rooms, IM’s, etc allow bullies to assume anonymity and allows for a distancing effect between the bully and their victim. Last week, I did a little bit a research into how cyber bullying is different and where it got started. Supposedly, it began with chat rooms such as AOL IM. Cell phones weren’t as popular until the 1990s, and use of them has increased especially among adolescents. Now, 75% of 12-17 year olds own cell phones  while only 45% did in 2004. This has caused a rise in cyber bullying over texting, which makes sense. Social media also comes into play. Myspace, the “pioneer of social media” allowed people to create their own personal space and interact with one another. Additions like facebook, twitter, and google + all came later. However, like cell phones, this causes more interaction online and therefore another increase in bullying online. Sites like these allow a larger audience to view a different and more private side of a person, which increases vulnerability