The Carleton University Students’ Association’s (CUSA) anti-cyberbullying campaign, “Speak Out to Stop Cyberbullying,” is running Oct. 22-26 with plans to feature an online pledge, video public service announcements, and a panel discussion.
The campaign was initially scheduled for early October, but was delayed because of the fall break poll.
“Speak Out to Stop Cyberbullying is an awareness week with the intent of opening up a conversation about online harassment at Carleton,” CUSA vice-president (student issues) Hayley Dobson said via email.
“The week will feature an online pledge for students to sign which asks them to take a stance against cyberbullying,” she said.
“We will also be set up in the atrium asking students to contribute to a video by telling us how they will speak out.”
The online pledge is currently on the CUSA website. Alongwith a promise to stand up against bullying in all forms, the pledge also includes the words, “I will not share or encourage hateful content or any form of cyberbullying when I am online and I will not allow it to be part of my online presence.”
A panel discussion was also organized that addressed different aspects of cyberbullying and how they can be specifically addressed at Carleton.
According to a posting on the CUSA website, students are encouraged to follow the Twitter hashtag #cusaspeaksout and tweet their intentions to end cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying has been given the spotlight in national news recently with the suicide of British Columbia teen Amanda Todd after she was bullied.
A conversation about cyberbullying at Carleton was sparked this summer when threatening image macros appeared online targeting student Arun Smith.
CUSA’s cyberbullying campaign comes after its executives threw out campaign materials from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) and opted to create their own, Carleton-specific campaigns.
Some students are concerned that the CUSA campaign isn’t specific enough, including Smith.
Smith helped to organize the CFS anti-homophobia/transphobia campaign, which has been banned from service centres along with other CFS materials.
Smith said the CUSA campaign failed to address the underlying issues behind cyberbullying, and clubbed various forms of discrimination under a single umbrella term.
“Cyberbullying is a headache, when the problem is a brain tumor,” he said.
“It’s particularly rich . . . to claim to be tackling cyber-bullying . . . when this [CUSA] executive is responsible for taking $89,000 worth of materials out of the service centres which were a tool for students to use to fight back against the things that cause cyberbullying,” he said.
Dobson said the CUSA campaign is focused on cyberbullying because “it involves a wide range of issues.”
“Rather than create a campaign focused solely on homophobia and transphobia, I wanted to address the concept of harassment itself,” Dobson said. “It can take a wide variety of forms not limited to the previous two types of discrimination.”
Erica Butler, programming co-ordinator at the GLBTQ Centre, said she was happy that CUSA was helping bring issues of cyberbullying to light, but mentioned that she does “think it’s important to recognize that all bullying is not the same and that homophobic and transphobic bullying is especially troubling and needs to be specifically named in order to be addressed.”
