Techno bullying

Via CNET news:

According to a survey conducted earlier this year by U.K. children's charity NCH, one in five kids has been bullied via digital phone or computer. Bullying by text message was the most common form of abuse reported, with 14 percent of children interviewed saying they had received upsetting messages on their mobile phones. The interactions run the gamut from disconcerting to downright terrifying.

The more extreme instances of techno-bullying involve so-called "happy slapping," where physical assaults are recorded on mobile phones and distributed to Web sites and other phones via video messaging.

Experts say that while most bullying occurs at school, or on the way to or from school, mobile phone bullying follows students into their homes. Kids often do not tell adults about harassment for fear that their phones will be taken away, nor do they want to turn their phones off, as they are a key device for their social lives. In the UK, 97% of children aged 12 to 16 own mobile phones.

The attitude that "all kids get bullied and learn to live with it," besides being factually inaccurate, also contains the admission that adults do not bully each other like this. Among adults, "happy slapping" would result in a criminal charges, as would many of the lesser forms of harassment. Kids aren't learning this at home, they're learning this in the Lord of the Flies, nowhere-near-enough-caring-adults environment of the school.

When I was in college I came to believe that high school was about socializing everyone so that they "knew their place" and wouldn't get uppity. The social strife was designed to further racism, sexism, and classism, to destroy confidence, to destroy solidarity, to sow self-doubt, to enhance conformity. But what I didn't get was that this wasn't coming just from "the culture," from parents and kids. It is enabled and enhanced by the environment of the school, in which children can so easily be victimized without adult advocates to come to their defense.

When we first decided to homeschool, someone close to me said he thought it was a good idea because (and I quote): "Elementary school was when I learned that adults don't really care about children and are not actually there to help you."