Canadian high schools should be prepared for a new wave of cyber bullying due to social networking sites that allow users to post anonymously.
Formspring, a social network which according to their website has 24 million accounts, gives users the choice to post a comment with or without a username.
Kingston teenager Alexis Dunn said she switched schools after being harassed on Formspring and Twitter in 2009.
It began when an anonymous Twitter user began posting comments like “Alexis is a slut” and “Hope the herpes go away” at the start of Dunn’s grade 10 year, Dunn said.
The harassment wasn’t exclusive to Dunn. Fellow Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School students were also targeted on the Twitter account, Dunn said.
“Every rumour you heard at school was on that [Twitter,]” she said.
Although parents were phoning in their complaints, Dunn said the staff couldn’t get involved until the Twitter postings occurred during school hours. Once this happened, the police tracked the IP address and shut down the account, according to Dunn.
But Dunn’s bullies continued to target her over Formspring.
“People were posting anonymous comments on my profile like ‘You have chlamydia,’ ” Dunn said. “I felt really bad. I was crying a lot and didn’t want to go to school. It was to the point where I didn’t know who my friends were.”
Being unidentifiable online worries Grande Prairie, Alta. vice principal Jennifer Rimmer.
“I think it’s even more dangerous because you are one more step removed,” she said. “The screen-to-screen contact means people are more cruel.”
Though Rimmer hasn’t had any cases of bullying over Formspring at St. Joseph Catholic High School, she said she’s aware of it.
“I’ve heard they’re causing problems down East,” she said.
At the moment, Rimmer said most of the cyber bullying she sees is through Facebook and text messaging. But cases of bullying have decreased this year thanks to the guidance of the school’s RCMP resource officer, she said.
“Every school in Grande Prairie has [an RCMP officer] assigned to them, but each officer differs in how involved they are,” she said. “She’s really helped us crackdown on bullying.”
In one case in 2011, as Rimmer describes, five girls who were bullying other students on and offline each received a $250 bulling ticket from the RCMP.
“The nice thing about cyber bullying is that I have written proof. Once it’s there it’s never deleted,” Rimmer said.
Kids will bring in Facebook screen captures and saved text messages as validation of harassment, she added.
However, Rimmer said there’s a fine line between when the school is able to take action against bullying.
“I can’t punish or do anything if it happens outside of school but the thing is most of the time it ends up affecting school anyway,” she said.
With suicide as the second leading cause of death in 15-24 year olds, according to Canadian Mental Health Association, this sort of anonymity provided by social networking platforms is worrying to many.
“I think it’s only a matter of time before we see that kind of cyber bullying up here too,” Rimmer said.
