When is it too early to start educating your children/students on bullying? Especially online bullying – where screens and harmful posts hide anonymous users? The answer: never. The earlier your student understands the harsh consequences of what just a few seemingly-harmless words online can reap, the safer and happier they, and everyone else around them, will be. This was exactly why Ellora, Aava, and I wanted to discuss this with the girls today at our weekly meeting. In order to help release the students’ pent-up energy from sitting around in desks all day, we provided a short, yet exciting activity for them to participate in. To begin, I brought in blown up balloons, and we paired them off into groups of four. The objective of this activity was for each group to use nothing but their lungs to blow and keep their respective balloon from touching the ground. If at any point during the game, they used their hands or legs, or if their balloon touched the ground, that group was disqualified. Taking up only about fifteen minutes to play, all of the students seemed to thoroughly enjoy the game and each other’s’ company. From there on, we settled the students down in seats – with the help of some snacks, of course – and we introduced our theme for the week: cyberbullying. We first posed this question: what is cyberbullying? Not too surprisingly, most of the students knew the definition of the word, as well as the basic understanding of the action. But none of them realized just how many people are being affected by online bullying. To 81% of teens, cyberbullying is, with lack of a better word, easier. It’s easier to get away with, it’s easier to pretend as if you aren’t bullying another person, and it’s easier to hurt. However, each year, over 4,500 children and teens are committing suicide – the third leading cause of death for those aged between 10 and 25 – because of bullying, and from that number, around 20% are deaths from online ridicule and humiliation. Many don’t even realize that they’re being a cyberbully until the effects and consequences of their one tweet or Instagram post becomes obvious, and often, that is much too late. So if there is to be even the slightest chance of preventing cyberbullying with the continuing growth of the age of social media, we must instill these concepts into our students’ and children’s heads and educate them early. I passed around two different cyberbullying worksheets, a crossword puzzle, and a matching activity, around to the students ten minutes before the end of our meeting, on which they worked until they left, hopefully with a sense of respect, courtesy, and civility, newfound or not, to others and their lives on social media. A poster that I see on a daily basis at school says, “Before you [text], , [Instagram], [Facebook], THINK. Is it True? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind?” If everybody joins forces together, there’s no way that cyberbullying can’t be stopped.
-Ashley X.
