As a counselor, I am again saddened by another case of online bullying, embarrassment, and harrassment lead to a young person committing suicide. The case I am speaking of is the case of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman who committed suicide last week after being outed as a homosexual by use of online video and webcast. The two students, one was his roommate, who were behind the outing of this student have been charged with crimes related to posting of the video and harrassment. And the story has again brought the idea of bullying, cyber-bullying, the use of technology to humiliate and harass others to the point where a young person thinks the best option is to take their own life.
Even as a middle school counselor for only 2 years, I have worked with countless students on the issues of bullying, cyber-bullying, and suicide ideation. Recent Iowa Youth Survey data shows that roughly 11% of our 8th graders have made a plan to commit suicide or have attempted suicide. This could be due data in that same survey that shows that roughly 50% of our 6th and 8th graders feel they have been bullied in the past year. Both of these numbers are way too high and having conversations, discussions, and information given to this age-group both at school and home is constantly needed.
The only question I get from parents sometimes is "why is bullying so different nowadays? why so different because it is online or using technology?". Those are valid questions because I remember bullying when I grew up and it was bad....but not so bad that I thought of suicide. I doubt my friends considered suicide either. But what is different is that bullying ended when we went home, it wasn't constant. Now, I meet with students who get texts about them, their body, or their beliefs forwarded around all day. One student I met with last year even got several texts after 2 a.m.....on school night! With almost 80% of our middle school students on a social network site such as Facebook, again the bullying and taunting can be 24-hours a day. And if you think "well, just quit Facebook or that site", well, good idea in theory, but those networks are that students "social network" and quitting that site means isolation and loneliness for that student, two things that can lead to depression and suicide. As you can see, online bullying or bullying using technology can be constant and way worse than the bullying we grew up with. And the solutions are not simple. The best solution is discussing these issues with your child, schools discussing it with their students, and students learning "digital citizenship" which means knowing how to be a good citizen when using our rapidly changing technology. If one more student dies due to an issue like this, it will be too many....we must act to solve this problem now. And the solution starts with all of us.
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