12 WITH THE FUTURE IN MIND
Schools Weekly – December 2009
Hadford High School A case study in ‘cyberbullying’
Nathalie was a 14-year-old pupil at Hadford High School. Because she arrived at the school three years after the other students had settled in and made friends, she was faced with the challenge of trying to integrate with an established social group. Naturally quiet and introverted, she found it difficult to make new friends. Added to this, her mother had become very protective since they moved house, encouraging Nathalie to stay at home in the evenings, while she went out to work. As a consequence, it was almost impossible for the teenager to build an independent social life, and she compensated for this by spending her evenings chatting online.
Although the other students seemed to accept Nathalie at first, and she joined the girls’ social networking website, a small group of girls began to tease her and make cruel remarks about her appearance a few weeks after she arrived. This behaviour quickly escalated into outright bullying, when the group began to spread lies about Nathalie and subject her to threats and blackmail.
To make matters worse, the bullying continued online. The group began to exclude Nathalie from their online chats, at times blocking her from conversations, and at others, posting malicious gossip about her and her relationships with boys. After this, the girls spread the slander even wider by texting it to other students, and eventually Nathalie began to receive abusive text
By Phoebe Coastman
messages from strangers. In spite of this, in an effort to remain part of the group, she continued to log on to the social networking site.
One of the consequences of this continuous online harassment was that Nathalie began to visit unmoderated chat rooms, where she fell victim to even worse verbal aggression. She also experimented with alternative online identities and intimidated other young people in chat rooms from the safety of her anonymity. Like her own aggressors, she spread lies and engaged in socially manipulative chat, threatening and blackmailing other chatters. This gave her a temporary sense of power and control over others that she lacked in her real-life relationships.
Nevertheless, being excluded from her immediate social circle was affecting Nathalie’s self-esteem, and she became convinced that she was widely unpopular, both on and offline. Over the weeks, she isolated herself even more, becoming so dependent on her virtual relationships that they
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started to replace her real life contacts. It became obvious that Nathalie had a serious problem when she began to truant from school in order to spend the day chatting online. During an interview with her personal tutor, Nathalie admitted that she had been victimized online and at school and that she was spending all day in chat rooms. She was referred to a psychologist for counselling to help her overcome her lack of confidence and sense of isolation.
Realizing that Nathalie’s experience was unlikely to be unique, the school authorities decided to introduce a programme to increase student, staff and parent awareness of online bullying and its potential consequences; in addition, the school improved its system for reporting harassment, and gave staff supplementary training in detecting possible cases of cyberbullying.
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