Cyberbullying task force seeking practical answers

From the Dalhousie Magazine Fall 2011.

A couple of years ago, around the time she came out, Breanna Fitzgerald was bullied. She was followed home. Windows were broken in her house.

“It was just a pretty stressful thing,” says Ms. Fitzgerald, who graduated in June from Breton Education Centre in New Waterford, Nova Scotia. “I’m pretty good
at taking stuff in stride, but nobody likes to go through
that, right?”

In 2010, Ms. Fitzgerald earned a Nova Scotia Power of Positive Change Award recognizing leadership in her GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered) community. She’s now sharing her experience and insights as the youth representative on the government’s cyberbullying task force.

Chairing the task force is Dalhousie law professor and human rights authority Wayne MacKay (LLB’78), who believes this cyberbulling initiative is the first in Canada. It was precipitated by the suicides of two Nova Scotian teenage girls whose deaths have been attributed in part to bullying.

Their mandate is to identify “... practical short-term and long-term recommendations to address cyberbullying of children and youth.”

There is a lot of ground to cover, with the final report due at the end of 2011.

Prof. MacKay says tasks include defining bullying and cyberbullying, holding youth focus groups across the province, seeking statistics on the prevalence of bullying and cyberbullying, reviewing successful programs, identifying key players in the issue and their roles, looking at possible legislation and policy changes, compiling human and written resources, hearing from experts in such areas as restorative justice and Internet safety, and raising awareness.

The list of tasks is as great as the seriousness of the issue.

“I suppose the most obvious examples are the suicides, but even short of suicides I think we’ve probably ignored or underestimated how damaging bullying is,” Prof. MacKay says.

The five-member task force is assisted by a 20-member working group. Organizations represented in this group include the Nova Scotia Teachers Union, Kids Help Phone, Canadian Mental Health Association, Council on Mi’kmaq Education, and Council on African Canadian Education.

The task force working group includes John LeBlanc, an associate professor in Dalhousie’s Departments of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Community Health and Epidemiology; and a staff pediatrician at the IWK Health Centre. As a pediatrician, he always checks in with his patients to see if they may be experiencing bullying or bullying someone else.

“I just recently saw a girl with an eating disorder who had been bullied for a couple of years until she switched schools,” says Dr.LeBlanc. “And that’s clearly one factor in her eating disorder.”

No easy solution

Being bullied as a child can follow someone for the rest of their life. Prof. MacKay found that whether he’s in the grocery store or at the gym, people in their 50s and 60s will come closer to tell him about how they were bullied as children.

That the issue resonates with the community is obvious from these chance encounters, emails and letters to the task force, and the number of online survey responses. That there will be no easy answer is also clear.  

“It’s kind of a microcosm of a lot of our social issues. The simple solution is rarely the only correct solution,” Prof. MacKay says. “Not to say there shouldn’t be more sanctions, and that’s one of the things we’re going to look at – policies and legislation change – but I think many of the more effective solutions lie in changing the way people interact.”

Dr. LeBlanc is also affiliated with the national Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network (PREVNet) and he explains that responses to bullying can be approached from an individual, group or systems perspective.

The individual approach might be the least effective, because bullying is often kept hidden from adults and victims may deny it because they’re afraid of retribution. A group approach can include preventive work that brings children together to interact regularly in shared activities or peer problem solving when bullying occurs. Examples of these are the “No Blame Approach,” “Circles of Support,” and “The Method of Shared Concern.”      

And then there’s a systems approach, from changing a school or organizational culture to addressing society more broadly. “If we’re going to solve the problem, the overall thrust has to be changing what we as a society believe is appropriate for humans, how to interact with each other, what we want to teach our kids and what we want to model for them,” Dr. LeBlanc says.

’Do The Right Thing'

The parents’ representative on the task force is Wendy MacGregor (BA’83, LLB’87), who witnessed the effects of bullying first-hand and then did something about it. About eight years ago, her children began asking questions about how to respond when a peer was unkind.

“In the early grades there are social situations that start to happen in the schoolyard and in the hallways where kids witness this kind of behaviour, where somebody is doing something that’s shifting the power balance or it’s exclusionary, ” Ms. MacGregor says. “Someone’s being hurt and kids feel like they should be trying to make the situation better, but they don’t know how to do that.”

Ms. MacGregor developed Do The Right Thing, with co-creator Sandy Lund, as “... an all-original, all-kids musical performance to educate elementary school students about bullying issues.” A video version will be available for free downloading this fall at dotherightthingplayers.com

Education and social responsibility

The advent of cyberbullying has brought with it new challenges. Unlike traditional bullying where you may encounter your nemesis in the playground or mall, cyberbullying is with you 24/7 through social media. The permanence of what’s posted and the fact that users may be anonymous are also differences.

“I’ve heard some accounts of the impact that (anonymity) has,” Prof. MacKay says. “Some people hardly want to go out because they don’t know who’s sending these awful messages. So you can’t even say, ‘Well, I’m going to avoid the bullies because you don’t know who the bullies are.”

Dalhousie’s Dean of Computer Science Michael Shepherd and post-doctoral research fellow Bonnie MacKay (PhD’09) speak of the importance of education and social responsibility when it comes to social computing applications.  

“The problem is not the technology,” Dr. Shepherd says. “It’s how people are using the technology and to solve that you have to educate them.”

Dr. MacKay helped develop a course on social computing for students in computer science and other disciplines.

The course covers different types of social computing applications, how they evolved, the technology in broad strokes and some of their social implications, including privacy and copyright issues. Cyberbullying is also touched on.

“I hope that students go away with a stronger understanding of what makes these applications work, as well as thinking about the issues behind them,” she says. 

Collaborative steps in the right direction

The issue of bullying and cyberbullying is not going away, but there is hope arising from the work of individuals, the task force and other groups.

Ms. Fitzgerald offers her words of hope to young people who are experiencing bullying. 

“You’re not alone. Even though you feel like you’re the only one going through it you’re really not,” she says. “Just know that you’re better than that and it does get better. People grow up. And you’ll absolutely be a stronger person for it.”