School bullies increasingly tormenting victims online

Masami Murai and Mitsuhiko Watanabe / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers
The Yomiuri Shimbun
November 20, 2007
Source: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071120TDY04302.htm

Until a few years ago, bullying was largely confined to the school playground and the classroom. But now bullies have found another means of intimidation--the Internet.

In autumn last year, messages posted on an Internet bulletin board told a third-year male middle school student in Sendai to "drop dead" and "disappear from this world." Police traced the two students who wrote the sinister messages and sent them to a family court, but the damage had already been done: the victim refused to go to school for some time and eventually transferred to another school.

And in November, the name of a third-year male middle school student in Akita was used in a pornographic novel that was posted on the Internet. The student could not bring himself to go to school for a while, and police efforts to determine who had used the name came up empty-handed.

What is more, such cases of online bullying are on the rise.

A nationwide survey on school bullying in the 2006 academic year released last week by the Education, Science and Technology Ministry showed that e-mail and Internet bulletin boards had been used to taunt or bully others in nearly 5,000 cases. As such, schools have to devise new measures to deal with a type of bullying that was virtually unheard of until only recently.

Classmates of a third-year high school student who committed suicide in July were found to have hounded him through mobile phone messages to give them money. Photos of the boy's naked body and abusive language toward him were posted on a Web site, but this case happened after the survey was conducted and was not included in the ministry's figures.

Masashi Yasukawa, chairman of the National Web Counseling Council, said bullying over the Internet increased rapidly last year.

The council has been swamped with calls from children seeking advice. One child said someone had secretly taken his photo and sent it on by e-mail, and another asked what they should do after their photo had been posted on Internet sites seeking dating partners for money.

Abusive "chain letter" e-mails have been transmitted to classmates, and e-mails bearing fake names and addresses have also been reported.

Some students have even gone a step further, setting up fake online "school bulletin boards" on which they pick on other students. These "underground" bulletins are operated without the knowledge of teachers and parents.

A teacher at a public middle school in Kanagawa Prefecture was horrified after seeing messages several students wrote on such a bulletin board. The targets of their invective--which included postings such as, "You really make me sick," and, "You really suck. Don't push your luck"--were openly named.

Victims are often targeted one by one, with the name-calling shifting from one student to another after a case draws attention for several days.

The company operating the server of the Web site was asked to close down the online bulletin board. However, he could not identify the people responsible for opening the site, and the bulletin was left untouched.

"The school can't control these online bulletin boards, so all we can do is ask students to refrain from tormenting others," the teacher said.

As long as efforts to trace which students are writing abusive messages online prove fruitless, schools will struggle to concoct effective preventive measures.

A teacher of a public school in Fukushima Prefecture said e-mail and online messages were being used to bad-mouth others, but teachers were being thwarted in their efforts to stamp out the abuse.

"Even though we want to stop the students from doing it, we don't know which students we should be telling," the teacher said.

But some IT companies are taking steps to tackle the problem.

On Nov. 7, these companies launched fee-charging services to monitor bulletins on "underground" school Web sites and started asking Web site operators to delete abusive messages. These companies have already received 10 inquiries from education boards and private high schools, according to sources.

Gunma University Prof. Hirotsugu Shimoda, an expert on information and media, said the 5,000 cases revealed by the ministry survey were merely the tip of the iceberg, considering the number of children who use cell phones. "Children badmouth others partly for fun. Teachers and parents should help children understand as soon as possible the pain inflicted on people who have been slandered," he said.

(Nov. 20, 2007)