Can Internet Babies Coo?
March 29, 2008
In the physical world, empathy and morality can be influenced and taught by exposing children and adults to situations that emphasize our interconnectedness. The challenge is how to do this on the Internet, where cyber-bullying and harassment are growing problems.
According to Paul Bocij’s book The Dark Side of the Internet, approximately 4 percent of Asians have been victims of cyber-harassment, and if those numbers don’t seem significant enough, a case study in California illustrates how cyber-bullies can target ethnic groups. The Washington Post reported that in 1996 Richard S. Machado, a former student of the University of California at Irvine, sent harassing e-mails to 59 Asian students with the signature “Asian hater.” Cases like these raise the question of how to combat aggression before it gets out of control. It may have saved the life of South Korean entertainer Yuni, who took her own life in January after being harassed by an anonymous predator.
A new program, appropriately titled Roots of Empathy, aims to teach children empathy, kindness and connectedness through classroom visits from a neighborhood child and parent. Kids find it rewarding and endearing to show kindness, rather than experience the unkindness of others or even show unkindness to others. Acts of kindness create memories of the good side in all of us, and such memories can be rejuvenating and empowering both in children and adults.
Preliminary research shows that even short visits by babies to classrooms reduces the aggressive behavior of students. The University of British Columbia in Vancouver observed aggression patterns of more than 2,000 children for the last seven years, and found that 88 percent of children with a propensity toward aggression showed a decline in their aggression index following the program.
However, a new form of bullying is rapidly growing. Cyber-bullying, or Internet bullying, is the use of any form of digital media such as instant messaging, blogs, Web sites, e-mails, chat rooms and cell phones with the sole intent to cause harm. This may include intent to humiliate, threaten, embarrass, cause emotional distress, reputation loss, demand submission, perpetuate hate, and distort the identities and motives of others.
In an unsupervised digital world, with few laws and no boundaries, where identities are fluid and fiction becomes fact overnight, cyber-bullying is an exciting game for digital predators. While in face-to-face bullying the identity of the bully is known, in cyber-bullying the identity of the bully is often masked or anonymous. Bullying is restricted to a geographic location, whereas cyber-bullying is a drama played out on a worldwide stage with free and ready access to anyone, anywhere, at any time to watch or participate in the process.
Cyber-bullying is a devastating problem for many children, and in fact, according to a report in the Financial Times, children are more afraid of cyber-bullying than actual bullying and even pedophiles. Why? Children get respite from bullies in their schools when they go home, but they get no respite from cyber-bullying. Cyber-bullies are on the job 24/7, watching and preying, and can recruit other online bullies in a matter of a few mouse clicks.
The importance of early intervention to cyber-bullying cannot be over emphasized. The first response and reaction of most who are harassed by cyber-bullies is to lean on the law, but unfortunately, this can be an expensive dead end in many cases. Laws on cyber-bullying are in their formative stages, while freedom of speech, even irresponsible freedom of speech, has ardent supporters with unequivocal legal language to back it up.
The burden of waging the battle against cyber-bullies falls on the shoulders of children, teachers and parents. As a parent, ignorance about the Internet and what your children do on the Internet can be a costly, and sometimes even deadly, gamble. There are no babies to coo on the Internet and teach our children empathy. We still have to do it the good old-fashioned way, one day at a time, by modeling empathetic behavior.
Uma G. Gupta is a lead professor at the State University of New York at Brockport and a senior adviser to SUNY for Women and Minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
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