Irish Gov't Seeks To Rein In Cyber Bullying

An anonymous reader points out a story on the Irish Times that says "the Irish government is looking for ways to combat 'cyber-bullying' after data indicated that a significant percentage of young children are subjected to this kind of abuse via their mobile phone and popular social network accounts. The industry has been asked to come up with solutions for this problem and a government office is due to publish a guide on the issue in the near future. Surely this is a problem faced by children in all developed countries these days." Add "for the children" to the list of reasons to track the Web-site habits of mobile web users in Ireland.

Just plain bullying

As an Irish person I'm glad that something is being done about bullying. I was bullied at school a lot and when not being beaten was subject to horrendous psychological bullying.

The main point here though is that so-called "Cyber-bullying" is just bullying. Various organisations have been sensationalising this issue by prefixing [i]cyber[/i] and pretending it's a new issue. What about when I was receiving phone calls at all hours? Was that cyber-bullying? It was just called bullying in my day.

I really think that this whole issue is doing more to harm the reputation of the internet/computers/phones than it is to resolve the larger issue of bullying. All I expect to see from this is a large set of draconian yet ineffective restrictions placed around communication media and this is something that disgusts me for a lot of reasons.

Re:Just plain bullying

Apologies for replying to myself but my first post doesn't read back the way I intended it to.

I would like something to be done about bullying as a whole, but I suspect that when implemented under the banner of cyber-bullying it will completely miss the point and will likely be doomed to failure. The emphasis on the 'cyber' aspect tells me it'll be cheap and ineffective technological measure when we could be using this opportunity to tackle bullying in the wider scheme.

Re:Just plain bullying

and to the parents that don't teach their children how to cope with being bullied.

Bollocks . When mob mentality comes into it, you see how well you stand up against 15-20 people. It's starts with the leader of the cool gang, then it's the cool gang and then it's the people siding with the rest of them to keep on the good side.

It's amazing how one or two bad apples can turn the tables. It is not the Hollywood image of one bigger kid pushing people around - far from it. The big kids, much like bigger dogs, have nothing to prove.

I used to be bullied

It stopped when I was legally able to drive. Nothing concentrates the mind of someone who beat you up in the playground as much as seeing you accelerate towards them and swerve away at the last second later in the day.

Re:

I second that bollocks. However, three or four of our bullies were built like Biffa Bacon, one of them used an air-pistol to bushwhack other kids on the way to the sweet shop, and they were the main culprits in a group of 15-20 people. Kids who showed obvious transgender behaviour were basically permenent toast. Geeks frequently got hassled. None of the big kids who *weren't* bullies got picked on.

This is a *basic* problem. In adult life, sociopaths end up running countries, religions, and/or large amoral c

Re:Just plain bullying

Oh please. Adults act exactly the same way.

Re:

The best way to fight that kind of mob bulling IMO:

You pick the weakest of that mob. There's always that kind of guy that becomes a bully just to avoid being the victim instead, but that it's not physically strong. Find him when he's alone and beat the crap out of him. No mercy, no remorse. Beat him to a bloody pulp.

When the rest of the pack see that you're not a wimp and that if pushed too far you will stand your ground, they'll leave you alone. It's not a pretty advice, to pick on the weak. But the world

Re:Just plain bullying

if you cant learn to stick up for yourself as you are growing up god forbid when it comes time to step into the real deal where people are cut-throat just put a nicer face on it.

Let's have a Skinnerian look on this: rewarded behavior is repeated, punished behavior is not. Behavior that elicits no response, either good or bad, is not repeated, but that's learned slower.

To make bullying stop, you either have to not respond at all, or to punish the bullies. How could you punish them? Beat them up? I've done that a few times, doesn't work; plus, you get punished for it when people tell on you. Call them names? They don't care. Break their stuff? They'll enact their revenge. They're always better armed than you, because there are more of them. When ever you try standing up for yourself, they tread on you some more, and the "justice" system treads on you as well.

Then you can do nothing. That makes you an easy target, and it means you effectively don't mind them calling you names, punching your lunch out of your hands and onto the floor, breaking your stuff and being violent towards you.

You're saying that people should either fight an unwinnable war, or let themselves be conquered without offering any resistance. Right?

Re:Just plain bullying

Disproportionate retaliation works great.
I remember a few grades below me there was one of those overgrown douche-wads who tended to push round the others because he could. Well one day he went after a weedy little guy who happened to have balls like church bells.
The ambulance took the dickhead away with a 5 inch strip of skin missing from the side of his face and since the teachers heard the full story all the little guy got was a few detentions.
Big guy stopped hassling others and nobody ever fucked with the little guy every again.

We also had a case where a gang of 8 guys attacked some of my friends, I'll give the full story if anyone wants but it ended with a mob or 70 chasing them across the quad. We had plenty of fights at our school but gangs of tough guys attacking individuals simply wasn't tolerated by the students themselves.

School is basically like prison with less rape and more monotonous labour.

Re:Just plain bullying

Most people miss the point of "beating them up". Squaring up to someone and punching them on the nose and ending up on the floor grappling is not the answer. Premeditated violence is.

It has to be back-of-the-head violence, in their sleep violence, weaponised violence, scarring violence.

Sad, I know.

Ironic you've posted anonymously

It's ironic the person who says bullying doesn't exist and you should learn to deal with it hasn't got the courage to post with even a slashdot identity, but as anonymous coward.

Suggests they are too scared to stand by their posting, are frightened of being bullied?

Re:Just plain bullying

The solution is to stop raising a bunch of rude brats. The parents/teachers need to tell teenagers, "You have the body of an adult (reproduction, et cetera), and now it's time to start acting like one. Abuse of your peers will Not be tolerated." The bullying messages and phone calls are just a symptom, and treating the symptom is not going to cure the disease. You need to go directly to the source and teach teens to act with manners & that insulting other people is Not acceptable.

I too was bullied as a kid, not with internet but with verbal abuse, which led me to keep quiet so nobody noticed me. I never "escaped" that verbal abuse until I found myself in college with an adviser who refused to tolerate such behavior from his students. That's what we need today, but starting at age 13. If we can teach teens about adult behaviors like sex, then surely we can teach them manners too.

Re:Just plain bullying

I can't agree more. On the risk of sounding jaded/damaged, I have the following comments:

As someone that got bullied in the Netherlands I can vouch for the fact that the solution shouldn't come from outside. After many years of psychological and physical bullying (I still have a skull fracture scar to show for it), I decided to fight back at the age of 13. I did this in such a way that I immediately got left alone for the rest of my school years.

Take the biggest bully. Hurt him. A lot. Publicly. Even if you end up on the losing end of the fight at large, it's over. People might think you're a psycho, but it beats being bullied. Turning to a mobile operator to "prevent" bullying is sheer nonsense. The wankers will always find a way. It's not an Irish problem and it's not a problem of technology. It's about me sending my kid to self defense classes as soon as he's old enough.

I've found that those that excel at violence really don't need to use it.

The problem with cyber-bullying in Ireland is...

Irish kids are taught NOTHING about manners, and manners are what lead to common-decency.

The writer says, "Surely this is a problem faced by children in all developed countries these days." I would think that it's actually worse here because people seem to become more and more rude in real-life with every passing second.. and the (falsely) perceived anonymity of "hiding behind" a social networking engine or a mobile phone tends to exacerbate the issue.
Another part of the problem is that most Irish kids are shuttled to and from school in big feckin' SUV's [which should be banned in this country anyway..especially UK-made Range Rovers], and rarely actually socialise with other kids outside of school. This lack of socialisation isolates kids from seeing the pain inflicted by their actions. If they don't see the pain caused, then they have no empathy for the "victim." Here as in the U.S. children are almost completely isolated from adults in the name of "keeping them safe from perverts" and never learn any social skills from adults either.

In true American style, the Irish, instead of addressing the problems being generated by people, want to enact idiotic, ineffectual regulations and monitor the tools these people use. This approach will not work.

Why are the people in charge always so fucking stupid and clueless?

Re:

Why are the people in charge always so fucking stupid and clueless?

Perhaps because the people who put them in charge (being a democracy and all that) are even more stupid and clueless? After all, half of the population have below-average IQs [slashdot.org].

Re:The problem with cyber-bullying in Ireland is..

Yes, that would be true for that particular sample, but the IQ of a population is defined in terms of the distribution of intelligence [wikipedia.org] - and 100 is defined as the median intelligence. Since intelligence follows a normal distribution, median coincides with mean (average), and half the people have below average IQ.

Your sample represents a skewed distribution, but if we take your numbers to be the score an arbitrary intelligence test used to rate IQ, the median score is 123. So to have a 100 IQ, you'd have to score 123, placing the lower 9 in your group firmly under the wire.

TattleText(TM)

Well since filtering and heuristic analysis is probably impossible, I suggest TattleText(TM). The poor child can simply forward the offending text to a central authority. The central authority can then call the bully's mom.

Problem Solved.

Learn a lesson from America

The main reason we have a lot of bullying is that we have policies that don't allow students to ever confront bullies and use force to defend themselves when attacked. If a student punches a bully in the face for trying to do some sort of nasty physical bullying, like locking them in a locker, they can get suspended/expelled and arrested.

Let the victims of bullies stand up for themselves. It used to work in this country. When my dad was bullied at an early age back in the 1950s, he and the bully got into a fight and the bully got beaten up. The principle not only didn't care about the harm done to the bully, but hauled him into his office and called his parents to let him know that he had gotten beaten up by a kid who he had severely bullied. Back then the courts would have laughed any lawsuit over that out of court and would have probably awarded legal fees to my grandmother if she had to hire a lawyer to defend my dad.

The solution to bullying isn't "education," it's letting them get subjected to the consequences of their actions. I would consider it poetic justice if in a modern incident like what happened to my dad, the kid not only beat up the bully, but posted the video to Youtube for the whole world to mock the shit out of the bully.

Don't give me that "oh they're hurting on the inside" argument for treating them like a wounded animal, instead of a predator. Most people choose to not become like those who hurt them. Those that do choose that path shouldn't be shown any particular mercy by society or the legal system when their victims put them harshly in their place.

Re:Learn a lesson from America

I agree. I was bullied a lot during school and it stopped when I actually threw the guy on the teachers desk. Sure, during the next break I got some but the fact that I didn't run away actually did the rest. Never had a problem again.

Bullying is just to easy. The consequences are minor and the work involved is negligible. Since you can't do anything about the work it takes, change something about the consequences.

What I never understood was that often teachers took the side of the bully. I always assumed that probably the parents of those kids weren't much better and the teachers were just afraid.

I, for one, will teach my kids that when someone tries to bully them they have to retaliate decisively, brutally and make sure everyone knows that crossing them means physical damage.

School is like the world during the cold war. You need to demonstrate your power just enough so you never have to actually use it.

Re:

If you're too weak to even harm the big bully, pick one of the weakest bullies (those that are always around the big bad guy) and beat him. Hard. Bloody. The rest will take the hint that even if they can beat you, it's going to cost them a broken lip at the very least. Then they'll leave you alone.

with an iron fist

Ah... my shoddy mastery of the English language made me read the headline as 'Irish government seeks to reign in cyber bullying', which to me seems to be a much more attainable goal.

Here is the issue

If the same behavior - one kid bullying another or saying unkind things - was occurring in a non-electronic medium, we usually would consider it the sort of thing where it's a matter for the kids to settle among themselves, or at most, by the kid's parent talking to the bully or the parent, which then usually stopped it. But now, we're going to add the ISP, school authorities, police and courts into the mix and create a tempest in a teapot.

The most someone can do electronically is say things; they can't strike you, or hurt you, or do anything to you unless you accept their comments about you as valid. Kids have had nasty cliques against other kids for dozens of centuries. We need to allow kids to learn to toughen up a bit, if we coddle them too much, they won't get through the real world, and when something comes along that mummy and daddy can't protect them against, they're going to be in a lot worse trouble.

You want to do something against physical threats, fine. You want to do something against extortion ("give me your lunch money or else"), that's something that should be taken care of. But if you're going to treat mere communication of meanness or cruelty as more serious than mere taunts in the absence of an actual threat of violence, then what you're effectively doing is treating words the same as actions. A dangerous path that ends up usually producing stupid overreactions, as a number of incidents here on Slashdot have been reported, where some kid is given an assignment to write a story or some report, but does so in an edgy or unconventional way, is considered a criminal or terrorist and is treated that way for doing nothing more than doing his classwork as he was asked to do it.

I remember one I did. We were asked to give a report in class on how to do something. Well, having read once how too many people cut their wrists the wrong way, I decided to be edgy and unconventional, and write a report on the correct way of how to commit suicide by slitting your wrists. When I stood up to read it, the kids in the class thought it was great, and the teacher even pointed out I drew in examples of how to correctly position the wrist so you cut the vein properly. (Most people bend the wrist inward; that's wrong, you should bend the wrist so it is pushed outward.) And that's all that happened (other than I think I got an A for being thorough). The teacher understood it was simply a student doing a report he knew would be different in order to have fun in class, not some "cry for help" of a depressed kid who was planning to kill himself.

Today, if some kid had done the same thing, I suspect that instead of taking it as the joke it was, he probably would have been called to the principal's office and maybe gotten detention for it, or possibly have to go see a shrink before being allowed to go back to school.

I think the previous one is backward

Most people bend the wrist inward; that's wrong, you should bend the wrist so it is pushed outward.

It's been so long since I've done the report, that I think I wrote it backward in the example above, most people bend their wrist forward which pushes the vein inside and makes the suicide attempt less likely to be effective, you're supposed to bend your hand so the hand leans down so the wrist is bent inward, allowing better access to the veins to be cut.

I mean, I wouldn't want someone trying to commit suicide to use the original example wrong, have it fail to work and then sue me for giving them bad advi

Are there no harassment laws existing?

The article mentioned how someone bullying someone else by causing their phone to ring "all hours of the day and night."

We have laws in the U.S., at least, that make it illegal to harass someone without a legitimate purpose of communication, by either excessively calling them or otherwise disturbing them for the purpose of making them upset. If they have this, then the victim of someone being called at all hours already has legal protections to stop this sort of thing if it's occurring, and no new laws are needed. If they don't, then perhaps this is what should have been done.

In fact, I like the way they're written here. If you call me, and use foul language to insult me, I can have you arrested for harassing me. On the other hand, if you call me, and irritate me so badly that I curse you out and insult you with the most degrading and harshest profanity I can think of, you can't do anything to me. Which makes sense: I didn't call you, you called me; if you disturb me, then you have to put up with my response to you. If you hadn't called me and bugged me, you would never have gotten the insult in the first place.

These are just attempts to grease the skids for more draconian restrictions on the Internet, using the boiling frog analogy. You can't drop a frog in boiling water, he'll jump out, but gradually increase the temperature and he'll sit there and allow himself to be boiled to death, or so the analogy goes. Make a huge grab for people's rights and they will squawk; nibble away in little pieces and they'll never notice until they're all gone, and by then it's too late, unless the "canary in the coal mine" starts screaming Chicken Little style at the beginning and refuses to allow even the first bite. (Talk about mixed metaphors!)

The great enabler

Bullying is bullying, whether it happens by means of computers or not, and it is never a pretty sight. The thing about computers and the internet is that they enable people to have a far longer reach and a greater impact; and it doesn't just enable "the good guys", unfortunately. So when they talk about cyberbullying, it isn't just some lame excuse for imposing new censorship, there is actually a very real problem. In the days before the internet, bullying in the school at least stopped when you got home; but now it is on your telephone and on the internet, and with the use of simple scripts you can make it go on non-stop without any effort at all.

And the other thing about doing things on the internet is that it is more anonymous - it is so much easier to be cruel to a person you don't have to watch, unless, of course, you get a kick out of seeing others in pain, and it is a lot easier to avoid getting caught. At least right up to the point where some kid chooses to end their life, which is a problem on the increase.

I don't think the schools or service providers can do anything about the problem on their own. It is something that requires the whole of the community to work together against it; and that is yet another thing the internet has has an influence on: there isn't a lot of community feeling left. On the up-side, however, the internet could potentially be used to mobilize the community against this kind of thing.

People keep droning on about the nanny state and how everything would be better if the government just stayed out of everything; but how would that be better, when nobody in the community are willing to get off their soft arses and solve the problems? We get a nanny state because we, with our inaction and unwillingness to take part in a community, ask for it. I think it is verging on the contemptible to whine and complain about state interference when people don't even try to do it better themselves.