This is an excerpt from an article in The Coloradoan.
Bullies used to confront their victims face-to-face. They’d throw them against a locker and demand lunch money. Or they’d toss them into the locker room of the opposite sex.
Today, bullies make their mark often without ever talking to their victims. Sometimes they don’t even know them.
A hapless student trips in the lunchroom and spills a tray. Seconds later, a picture of his or her lunch-stained humiliation is posted to Facebook and then instantaneously sent to classmates who forward it to more friends. Before the next period begins, the student is so devastated, he or she vows to never return to school.
“Kids are human beings and where there are human beings, there will be bullying,” he said.
And when the bully is a teen or pre-teen girl with a smart phone in her hand, she can be hard to stop, said Johnson, who has been a Fort Collins police officer for 23 years and a school resource officer for eight.
“When I grew up, my social life was at school. I lived on a farm, and we had a party line and everyone could listen in on my calls,” Johnson said. “Now, the kids have laptops and smart phones, and they can send and receive photos and videos. They live connected to the Internet. Rather than sit and talk to their friends, they IM (instant messaging) them. This is how they socialize. This is how they spend their time.”
PSD doesn’t keep specific statistics on bullying, but the prevalence of cell phones makes it easy for kids to communicate with each other and to harass each other.
“You can have 100 counts of harassment by one keystroke,” Johnson said. “Then, you have someone posting pictures of someone else without their consent at a time when they are building their self-esteem. These are kids who are insecure. Or worse, you take a picture and morph it on someone else’s body and then you send it to 200 of your ‘closest’ friends. No wonder we have kids contemplating suicide when they have to deal with something like this.”
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