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Comment by anateus | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the conversation around this talks about the Internet. Note this from the article:

    Raza said he lost what few friends he had in the fallout, and had to change schools. “In the common room, students climbed onto tabletops to insult me,” he told L’actualité.

All "cyberbullying" does is prevent the bullying from stopping when the kids go home. Potential anonymity is a negligible factor as far as I can tell.

Yes, being world famous probably escalated the reach of his ridicule, but even if it never left his school, what was essentially his whole world turned against him. As someone else mentions in a comment there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to prevent this sort of pack behavior. But I hope someone does figure out a way.

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I've seen this with some of my kids. In my day, home was a safe sanctuary. The internet and associated hardware has penetrated the sanctity of the home, and its no longer a safe haven from the nasty harsh out side world.

The internet has destroyed that. IMHO, it is the single worst thing the internet has done.

I sincerely hope no one suggests that parents should exclude their kids from the internet which allows the bullys to win and control cyber space. Worse still, it then excludes them from the friends they might still have, and a lot of things the victim can use to fight back, and distract them selves from the nastiness. The internet is more good than bad.

I think laws for cyber bullying should have harsher penalties than normal face to face bullying. Face to face stuff is limited by physical proximity and time, cyber bullying can be 24/7. If bullied at school, the kid can escape it by going home after school, and not being there at weekends. With cyber bullying, you might not even get an evening off, let alone a week end.

Your front door has penetrated the sanctity of your home, and it's no longer a safe haven from the nasty harsh outside world because you leave it open all the time.

Internet doesn't penetrate anything. It's not like I plug my network cable in and my screen gets flooded with things I don't want to see or hear. It just displays a small popup saying "You're now connected".

Internet can actually be controlled much better than other technologies. Try stopping prank callers or abusive text messages. In your e-mail client it is just adding one simple rule and they all end up in my junk box.

Only if you go on sites that have the ability to receive messages from people (and where those people know who you are). You can choose to go to those sites, or to go elsewhere.

At school, when the bullies are following you around the playground all day long, you've got nowhere to hide.

Also, most cyberbullying typically leaves a papertrail behind it - you can take the Facebook posts or whatever as evidence of what's going on. In the physical world, that's often a lot harder to get.

The point is that the bullying goes from something fairly local (school), that can be escaped, to spreading around the world. This particular kid could move to Cambodia and some people there will probably recognize him.

There's a big difference between cyberbullying - using the internet/mobile phones etc to bully people - and physical bullying that's happened as a result of being recognised from the internet (or from newspapers, TV etc).

    > All "cyberbullying" does is prevent the bullying
    > from stopping when the kids go home.

It also changes the jurisdiction for the bullying. School policies and enforcement cover bullying that happens in school. Off campus, however, it's less clear. It might still be covered by the school's rules. It might be a private matter between families. It might be a legal matter.

> Off campus, however, it's less clear.

Off campus, 'bullying' is harassment and possibly assault. Or are those not actually crimes when the victim is a child?

It's the same on campus FYI, there is no magic law-immunity field around schools.

The police tend not to get involved because they believe parents and teachers are better placed to fix this behaviour than the law. And in general bullying in children is something that needs other than criminal punishment imo.

Obviously children need protection in all of their spheres of existence. At school its supposed to be teachers. At home (and on the internet) it's supposed to be their parents. And the layer above that is always the police and the state. That never changes.

As an aside, cyber bullying is super interesting to me, because when I was at school, home was the safety net. But so was the wotmania forum/chat room (when i was allowed to use the phone line...).

So much of the internet is annonymous, and that is part of what I enjoyed. There was no "social" then, or not really. Just a completely different way of being online I suppose?

All "cyberbullying" does is prevent the bullying from stopping when the kids go home.

That's a pretty big 'all'

Let's not turn this discussion into what's pretty big and what isn't

I thought that "all" was supposed to be sarcastic, but maybe I misunderstood. Anyway, I interpreted it as sarcasm.

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