By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
In the wake of the Megan Meier case comes a study that says that all forms of cyber-bullying, including text message as well as Internet-based bullying, are on the rise.
Hateful text messages, abusive e-mails and cyber-gossip are giving bullies new power over their victims — even in the supposed safety of their own homes, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
“Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty,” Kirk Williams and Nancy Guerra of the University of California at Riverside wrote in one of a series of reports published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
The reports, from researchers organized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show a 50 percent increase in the number of kids aged 10 to 17 who said they were harassed online — from 6 percent in 2000 to 9 percent in 2005. Source: Reuters
We Say: What surprised me the most was that 2/3 of the victims had never been bullied before. So what, are we opening up a new way of bullying and a new population of victims, due to the anonymity of a lot of these methods?
Yep, let’s pass yet another law against some idiotically perceived threat. You can’t file all the sharp edges off of reality. Whatever happened to sneaking up behind a bully and whacking him with a baseball bat?