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But it did not end there. As soon as Amanda
got home, the instant messages started popping up on her computer screen. She
was a tattletale and a liar, they said. Shaken, she typed back, "You
stole my stuff!" She was a "stuck-up bitch," came the instant
response in the box on the screen, followed by a series of increasingly ugly
epithets.
That evening, Amanda's mother tore her away
from the computer to go to a basketball game with her family. But the barrage
of electronic insults did not stop. Like a lot of other teenagers, Amanda has
her Internet messages automatically forwarded to her cellphone,
and by the end of the game she had received 50 - the limit of its capacity.
"It seems like people can say a lot
worse things to someone online than when they're actually talking to
them," said Amanda, 14, of
The episode reflects one of many ways that
the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying
standard adolescent cruelty. No
The technology, which allows its users to
inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a
deeper level of meanness. Psychologists say the distance between bully and
victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented - and often
unintentional - degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical
adolescent's lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.
"We're always talking about protecting
kids on the Internet from adults and bad people," said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, a nonprofit
group that has been fielding a growing number of calls from parents and
school administrators worried about bullying. "We forget that we
sometimes need to protect kids from kids."
For many teenagers, online harassment has
become a part of everyday life. But schools, which tend to focus on problems
that arise on their property, and parents, who tend to assume that their
children know better than they do when it comes to computers, have long
overlooked it. Only recently has it become pervasive enough that even the
adults have started paying attention.
Like many other guidance counselors, Susan Yuratovac, a school psychologist at
"I have kids coming into school upset
daily because of what happened on the Internet the night before," Ms. Yuratovac said. " 'We were
online last night and somebody said I was fat,' or 'They asked me why I wear
the same pair of jeans every day,' or 'They say I have Wal-Mart clothes.'
"
Recently, Ms. Yuratovac
intervened when a 12-year-old girl showed her an instant message exchange in
which a boy in her class wrote, "My brother says you have really good
boobs." Boys make many more explicit sexual comments online than off,
counselors say.
"I don't think the girl is fearful the
boy is going to accost her, but I do think she is embarrassed," Ms. Yuratovac said. "They know it's
mean, it's risky, it's nasty. I worry what it does to them inside. It's the
kind of thing you carry with you for a lot of years."
The new weapons in the teenage arsenal of
social cruelty include stealing each others' screen names and sending
inflammatory messages to friends or crush-objects, forwarding private
material to people for whom it was never intended and anonymously posting
derogatory comments about fellow students on Web journals called blogs.
"Everyone hates you," read an
anonymous comment directed toward a girl who had signed her name to a post
about exams on a blog run by middle-school students
at the
"They would talk about one girl in
particular who had an acne problem, calling her pimpleface
and things like that which was really mean," one Maret
student said. "That stuck with me because I've had acne, too."
One of the girls who started the blog said she and her friends had deleted all the posts
because so many people - including some parents - began to complain.
"I didn't see why they cared so
much," said the girl, who preferred not to be identified. "It's
obviously not as serious as it seems if no one's coming up to you and saying
it."
Rosalind Wiseman, whose book "Queen
Bees and Wannabes," was the basis for the recent movie "Mean
Girls," said that online bullying had a particular appeal for girls, who
specialize in emotional rather than physical harassment and strive to avoid
direct confrontation. But boys do their fair share as well, often using
modern methods to betray the trust of adolescent girls.
For instance, last spring, when an
eighth-grade girl at
Students would go online at school while
the girl was there and watch it, said one student from another school, who
declined to be named. Horace Mann officials did not reply to requests for
comment this week, but the student newspaper reported at the time that the
school had set up out-of-school counseling for the students directly involved
and held assemblies to discuss issues of sexuality and communication.
The incident is not an isolated one. In
June, a video showing two
Online lists rating a school's girls as
"hottest" "ugliest" or "most boring" are
common. One that surfaced at
But girls are not the only victims of
Internet-fueled gossip. A seventh grader at Nightingale-Bamford
School in Manhattan said she had recently seen an online video a boy had made
of himself singing a song to a girl he liked, who promptly posted it all over
the Internet. "I feel really bad for the guy," she said.
To a large degree, psychologists say,
teenagers are being tripped up by the same property of the Internet that has
compelled many adults to fire off an e-mail message they later regret: the
ability to press "send" and watch it disappear makes it seem less
real.
"It isn't quite the same as taking a
dirty picture of your girlfriend and showing it to everyone in the school
when you're standing there holding the picture," said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and author of "Life on the Screen." "There's
something about the medium that has a coarsening effect."
But a growing number of teenagers are
learning the hard way that words sent into cyberspace can have more severe
consequences than a telephone conversation or a whispered confidence. As
ephemeral as they seem, instant messages (better known as I.M.'s)
form a written record often wielded as a potent weapon for adolescent
betrayal and torment.
A sophomore girl at
Fieldston High officials declined to comment, as did the girl
and her parents, who requested that her name be withheld to protect her at
her new school. But several parents criticized the school administration for
pressuring the girl to leave rather than using the incident as a means to
teach a lesson about racist speech - and the pitfalls of instant messaging.
"When you say things over the Internet,
it feels like you are spewing into your diary," said Sandra Pirie
Carson, the parent of a Fieldston graduate and a
lawyer who offered to mediate between the school and the girl's family.
"If she had said those offensive things to her friend on the phone, I
have a feeling the friend wouldn't have called him and repeated what she
said, and even if she had, I doubt it would have had the same effect."
Many schools, ill-equipped to handle these
new situations, are holding assemblies to talk about them and experts in
traditional bullying are scrambling to develop strategies to prevent them.
"It's so nebulous; it's not happening
in the lunchroom, it's not happening on the school bus, yet it can spread so
quickly," said Mary Worthington, the elementary education coordinator
for Network of Victim Assistance, a counseling organization in Bucks County,
Pa. "Over the last year when I've been out in schools to do our regular
bullying program the counselors will say, 'Can you talk about e-mails or I.M.'s?' "
For parents of several students at the
About 30 students from
"It was frightening to see the
physical manifestation of this back and forth on I.M.," Ms. Penney said.
"I just never thought of it as such a big deal."