I'm sure we can all think back to a time when we were the victim of bullying. Bullying commonly takes place on the school grounds where the popular student either verbally or physically pick on the not-so-popular students. However, in this day and age, bullying has taken a new form. It no longer stays at school, but now extends to social media websites. This changes the scheme of bullying in the sense that there is a much larger audience to encourage, condone, or simply witness the bullying. The bullies can hide behind a screen and thus be more vicious in their verbal attacks. A relative issue is the reactions that some parents take when they find out that their child is being bullied.
In Danah Boyd's article "The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics", she defines bullying as involving unwanted, negative actions, an imbalance of power or strength, and a pattern of behavior repeated over time (7). An article posted by ABC online news titled "Parents: Cyber Bullying Led to Teen's Suicide" clearly emulates this definition of bullying. A 13-year-old girl named Megan committed suicide after being verbally bullied by her former friend's mother. The mother created a fake MySpace account in the name of "Josh Evans" and started an online relationship with Megan only to call her a slut, say she might as well kill herself, and break up with her in the end on the opinion that she is mean to her friends. The mother's intention was to teach Megan a lesson in defense of her own daughter but ended in Megan's suicide. The obvious issue here is the mother's reaction to her belief that Megan was mean to her daughter at one point in time.
ABC news also covered the story of a similar incident in the case of inappropriate parent action. Mother Debbie Piscitella intervenes when her daughter, McKenna, becomes the victim of Facebook cyberbulling. McKenna posted a photo on Facebook that received unwanted, cruel comments by another boy. The comments hurt McKenna so much that she had considered hurting herself just like in Megan's case. One day when the mother and daughter were at the mall, they ran into the boy who was bullying McKenna and Debbie started cussing him out as a way to tell him to stop bullying his daughter. When he said that he did not have to stop and he would not stop, she choked him.
It is outrageous the steps a mother will take to defend their child when it comes to bullying. Danah Boyd suggests that parenting today seems to require absolute belief that you're child is the best child ever and many parents think that their child can do no wrong and, thus, are unable to hear critiques of their own children. And that it is this belief that causes the parents to go to outrageous measures to defend their child, like Debbie did when she choked the bully. It is time for parents to take a step back and ask themselves if it is their job to get involved in bullying. And if they believe they must do something about the situation, reasonable and thought-out measures must be taken rather than instinctive, knee-jerk reactions out of anger.
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