School bullies are going high-tech

The video appeared on YouTube last June. Posted by a group of ninth-graders from a school in Železný Brod, a small town in northern Bohemia, it depicted a teacher requesting that a 15-year-old student clean the mess around his desk.

"Pick it up yourself, you piece of trash," the boy snapped back. Within seconds, the teacher charged the student and slapped him in the face.

The mobile recording received widespread attention, including a snippet on BBC News. Although it wasn't the cruelest and certainly not the only case of cyber-bullying in the Czech Republic, the video highlights how fast things have evolved in the past few years.

This high-tech form of bullying has only recently come to light in the country and is spreading at the speed of a click, as technology becomes second nature for teenagers. It's grown so rampant, in fact, that the Education Ministry finally stepped in at the beginning of the year and made cyber-bullying a punishable offense. This new regulation allows headmasters to punish students caught recording teachers and students on their mobile phones. The ministry also identifies cyber-bullying as any kind of attack via e-mail or the Internet.

"It mainly concerns older students of basic schools and high schools, children who own more complex mobile phones [with cameras] and work well with a PC," says Deputy Education Minister Klára Laurenčíková.

In most cases, notes Pavel Vichtera, chairman of the project Safer Internet, students use their mobiles to record teachers or classmates, sometimes in awkward or violent situations, and then disseminate the footage by uploading it to the Web or sending it through a mobile's Multimedia Messaging Service.

Kateřina Skalická, the psychologist at a Prague 3 school, ZŠ a MŠ Jaroslava Seiferta, remembers how a student recorded a classroom fight and then sent it out to others. And, at Hanspaulka school in Prague 6, a boy threatened a girl during an online chat because she rejected him, the principal, Marie Pojerová, reports.

"We don't come across [cyber-bullying] too often," Pojerová says, "as it mainly happens outside of the classroom."

It is the lack of spatial barriers that makes cyber-bullying so intense and its emotional consequences so severe, educators observe.

"If someone's beating you in a park, you can run away," Vichtera says. "But you can't escape cyber-bullying because it can catch up with you anywhere if you have a mobile phone or an e-mail account."

Any child can fall victim to cyber-harassment, though, most often, it is the weakest of the weakest - those who can't conceal their fear and defend themselves - who are targeted, says Hana Petráková, the head of Internet Helpline, a Prague-based call and chat center for children with questions or concerns over safe Internet usage.

Although no research has been done specifically on cyber-bullying in the Czech Republic, a 2005 study by the civic association Aisis found that 40 percent of students in the country have encountered bullying at some point. And a 2008 media analysis by the Pedagogic and Psychological Consultancy Institute cites cyber-bullying as the most widespread form of harassment among students. According to the institute's Deputy Director Ivana Slavíková, statistics from studies that monitor online harassment abroad show that between 20 percent and 30 percent of students surveyed have encountered cyber-bullying.

Internet Helpline statistics, however, show that, out of the 68 Internet-related phone calls from 2008, only four dealt explicitly with cyber-bullying.

"There are thousands of phone calls, but we only began to monitor them recently, so the numbers aren't exact," says Vichtera. "The thousands of children who call don't tell you that someone is bothering them, calling them over the mobile. They are concerned with the problem itself."

While the rules of electronic etiquette haven't yet been carved into stone, headmasters have gradually been introducing rules to steer tech-savvy kids away from misuse. While the Education Ministry passed its new cyber-bulling regulation only this January, some schools have long since had such rules in place. Pojerová, for instance, banned the use of mobiles during class four years ago.

"It's important that the teachers stick to the set rules so that the children get used to following them," she says, adding that no program specifically targeting e-violence at her school is in place yet.

Despite all the attention it's been getting, cyber-bullying is still not well addressed in schools here, says Věra Nouzová, the policymaker at Prague City Council's Drug Prevention Department.

Nouzová says many schools express an interest in finding ways to manage online harassment, but it never gets beyond that. While the Education Ministry is considering inserting a few guidelines to facilitate the way teachers deal with cyber-bullying, it is up to each school to decide how to address and solve the issue for now.

Vichtera believes that online harassment boils down to users' lack of knowledge about technology. He says kids are often not even aware that they are bullying electronically, because they're unable to define where ethical and proper behavior ends and where unethical behavior begins.

"Every child knows that you drive on the right ... and that they should look around before crossing the road, but none of these rules exist for the Internet or the online world in general," he says.

Martina Čermáková can be reached at
specialsection@praguepost.com