Cyberbullies Need to be Educated

The Courier Mail, 4 April 2009

Leading experts in the field believe that schools are focusing on the wrong issues when it comes to dealing with cyberbullying in school, and they clam that cyberbullying will continue to rise if bullies and their parents are not re-educated.

Cyberbullying expert and Queensland University of Technology lecturer, Dr Marilyn Campbell, believes that schools should do more than simply punish bullies and lift the self-esteem of bullied victims.

Dr Campbell claims that even though schools have ‘come a long way’ in dealing with cyberbullying, more needs to done. She believes that schools should implement ‘buddy programs, anti-bullying courses for Year 4 or 5 bullies and their parents and teaching [students] about cyberbullying in years 7, 8 and 9’ as key ways of ‘eradicating’ bullying in school.

‘What we are doing is concentrating too much on victims,' she said. `What we should be concentrating on is bystanders and bullies. Only 20 per cent of kids are involved in bullying, so therefore there are 80 per cent of kids who aren't involved. If you can then get those 80 per cent to actually look after vulnerable children, not in a stigmatising and patronising way, but where they actually have a social network around these kids, then that works,’ Dr Campbell said.

Dr Donna Cross, a cyberbullying academic at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, believes that bullies, and their parents, need to be educated instead of being punished. She said that bullying is a ‘learned behaviour and if it isn’t changed it can be intra-generational and inter-generational’.

 

 

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