School Bullying Council

A Detroit councilwoman who sponsored a recently enacted city law against bullying said this morning that the apparent suicide of a 7-year-old Detroit boy shows the need for a stronger response to bullying.

“For a 7-year-old to lose his life in any form is heartbreaking, but to imagine a child that young who is so sad that believes his only option is to do this? Heartbreaking is not a strong enough word,” City Councilwoman Saunteel Jenkins said today. “I can’t imagine what his family’s going through.”

Jenkins spearheaded Detroit’s anti-bullying law that went into effect last fall.

The city ordinance, one of many anti-bullying policies enacted in metro Detroit, particularly in local school districts, makes it a misdemeanor offense to bully children in person or online. The Detroit law extended the reach of enforcement beyond the city’s public schools, which already had a policy prohibiting bullying.

Under the city law, violators could face up to 90 days in jail, $500 in fines and community service requirements.

But Jenkins said the goal was not to be punitive; instead, the aim was to intervene and try to rehabilitate kids who bully their peers.

First-time offenders, for example, might get counseling and community service to help them learn the consequences of bullying. More egregious or multiple offenses might trigger the tougher penalties, she said.

Parents also can be held responsible for their children’s misbehavior under the ordinance, Jenkins said.

Jenkins said she’s going to work to make sure there’s broader awareness of the city’s law and the fight against bullying.

“This is a big issue for our city,” she said. “One of the most important things we can do is to make a safe, livable city for our children. If we can’t do that, it doesn’t matter what kind of budget we pass.

“We have to teach children that bullying is not OK.”

A Pew Research Center study conducted in 2011 found 88% of young people who use social media reported seeing others being “mean or cruel” on social networking sites. Still, a majority said their peers are “mostly kind” to each other on the sites.

One in five reported having been bullied during the previous 12 months in person, online, by phone or by text — bullying in person was the most common occurrence.

The study surveyed 799 children and teens nationwide, ages 12-17, and a parent or guardian.

Contact Matt Helms: mhelms@freepress.com, @matthelms or 313-222-1450

http://www.freep.com/article/20120524/NEWS01/120524034/Saunteel-Jenkins-anti-bullying-Detroit

Even if three Indiana girls were just kidding around and used emoticons and LOLs when they discussed killing classmates on Facebook, their talk still could be considered cyberbullying if it inflicted emotional harm, experts say.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the eighth-graders this week, claiming the Griffith Public Schools district in northern Indiana violated the girls’ civil rights when it expelled them on the basis of a personal off-campus conversation that attorneys say shouldn’t have been taken so seriously.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Hammond says that any reasonable person would have realized the 14-year-olds’ banter was in jest in part because of the use of emoticons such as smiley faces, humorous online shorthand such as LOL and ROFLMAO, and capital letters that represent sarcasm.

“The legal analysis asks whether a reasonable person viewing the conversation would conclude that the girls were about to inflict imminent harm. I think the use of emoticons and other forms of Internet-speak are simply one factor demonstrating that that was not the case,” ACLU attorney Gavin Rose said in an email.

Regina Webb, the mother of one of the classmates who was the target of the girls’ remarks, told The Associated Press on Friday she didn’t see any humor in the Facebook thread, which she printed out and provided to the middle school principal. Webb said her 14-year-old daughter, who is Facebook friends with the girls, was afraid to go to school for two days after the thread appeared. She said other students were whispering about her daughter.

“When they’re talking about putting someone in a bathtub of acid and lighting someone on fire…my daughter being the last person mentioned, I find nothing funny about that,” Webb said, calling the thread “disturbing.”

She noted the girls discussed whether it would be better to use a gun or a knife to kill someone, and how to cover up evidence. “I just think that goes a little beyond joking. To me, that is calculated, that has been thought about, that has been planned,” Webb said.

“We still see examples of students using emoticons like that even in actual cyberbullying cases,” said Justin Patchin, a criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “My position is it doesn’t matter if they did use those emoticons…It doesn’t matter if the intent was to joke around…If we look at the content, would we be threatened by it?”

Griffith school district attorney Rhett Tauber declined to comment.

“Cyberbullying is the emotional harm, not that they’re going to kill you, but that they’re talking about it even in a joking way,” said Parry Aftab, an attorney and executive director of Wiredsafety.org, a children’s Internet safety group.

Patchin agreed. “It doesn’t necessarily take an actual threat for the school to get involved in disciplining the students,” he said. “If the target in this case didn’t feel safe to be at school, then the school has the authority to take action,” he added.

Neither Patchin nor Rose were aware of any previous cases where the use of emoticons was cited, though Aftab said she had encountered the strategy several times. Patchin did cite a 2000 Pennsylvania case in which the state Supreme Court upheld the expulsion of a student who created a website that featured a diagram depicting the decapitation of a teacher despite his insistence that the content was a joke.

Both Patchin and Aftab said another key issue was whether the school district overstepped its authority by penalizing students for off-campus, after-hours speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to issue a clear ruling on the boundaries of schools’ power to regulate students’ online speech, they said.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/emoticon-defense-disprove-cyberbullying-16228796