Last month, 11-year-old Jessi Leonhardt, under the pseudonym “Jessi Slaughter,” posted a violently-charged video in which she blasted online cyber bullies with statements like “‘I’m happy with my life okay? And if you can’t, like, realize that and stop hating you know what? I’ll pop a Glock in your mouth and make a brain slushy.”
Cases like Leonhardt’s raise modern questions on parenting issues dealing with the new medium of always-on, always-connected advanced forms of communication.
When I was Leonhardt’s age, there were several, very important psychological factors which impeded my ability to bully or my likelihood to be bullied.
In Leonhardt’s case, her parents report she was given Internet access with a webcam in the privacy of her bedroom. After some repeated harassment over her sexual conduct from online bullies, she turned her webcam on and began to vent.
Children are able to express themselves with immediacy never before seen. In the case of many cyber bullies today, bullying also involves deindividuation. That is, it involves anonymity and the collective identification of a group. Deindividuation is blamed for the phenomena of mass hysteria and the mob insanity.
In my webcam-less youth, bullying required personal confrontation, identification and enough time in between an impulse and an action to reconsider and cool off. The case for the Internet’s catalytic effect on aggression and bullying certainly has merit.
However, there has been little discussion on how our impressions on youth aggression may be skewed by the effect of salience. While the availability of online media may increase aggressive expression, the availability of online data on such acts may cause us to use “availability heuristic,” the bias to believe something happens more often when its recollection more easily comes to mind.
In any case, today’s parents, who may not even know what Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are, may face a unique struggle not well represented in books on parenting.
Short of pulling the plug on their kid’s computer, how can parents protect their children from bullying if they don’t understand how children are communicating in the first place? It’s important to understand the psychological aspects that allow, reinforce and inspire bullying.
While plenty of literature has been published on the various motives of bullies, the internet age has amplified the role of deindividuation. There is probably no better example than the trophy-hunting bullying antics of “Anonymous,” a group of Internet trollers (another word for cyber bullies and just plain annoying people online).
These trollers from 4chan.org have gone to such lengths as harassing the parents of deceased cyber bullying victims on the phone, posing as their deceased sons and daughters. ?
Parents can reasonably intervene with their children’s social networks simply by observing which networks are at high risk for deindividuation. Some social networks have employed ranking incentives for maintaining an honest, online identity through virtual earnings like “karma points,” which are earned by long-term use of a social network without report of misbehavior.
In the early days of the Internet, parents were concerned with their children posting their actual names and photos online. Ironically, it is those anonymous people of whom parents should be extra cautious.