When the bullies move to cyberspace

BREMERTON, Wash. -- Like many teens, 15-year-old Phar West has harnessed the technologies her generation uses to communicate: instant messaging, texting, MySpace posting, blogging and hosting Web pages.

The Kitsap County ninth-grader, with a soft smile and red curly hair, has a Web site of her poetry, art and stories. She even invites others to contribute their own works.

But in an age when young trumps old in technological savvy, she's also suffered the consequences that come with surfing the Internet -- a place with little parental supervision and whose participants say almost anything without fear of discipline.

She's one of the growing number of teens who have been "cyberbullied" by their peers.

For West, it began months ago as a simple conversation with a friend from school over MSN Messenger, an instant messenging service.

"We were just talking one day and he started saying random inappropriate things that made me feel very uncomfortable," she said.

It got worse. There were threats of sexual and physical violence. The conversation moved offline and to school, she said.

"I was afraid of what he could do," she said. "And the school couldn't do anything to stop him."

Eventually, her friends intervened. Her parents got involved. The school was able to suspend the boy, but only after the harassment crept into the school day, she said.

"This thing could have been prevented if he had actually been punished to begin with," she notes.

School administrators are increasingly tasked with investigating cyberbullying and Internet harassment issues because of the potential they have to boil over into school. But the problem is so new, state and local school districts have yet to decide how far school officials should go if cyberbullying occurs off campus.

Meanwhile, about 10 percent of Washington state teens reported being a victim of bullying, harassment or intimidation over a cell phone or computer in the past 30 days in the 2006 Healthy Youth Survey, carried out every two years by a handful of state agencies. Cyberbullying has even been blamed for teen suicides that have occurred around the nation. School lock downs have resulted from rumors of gun-to-school plots by angry and blogging teens.

And summer vacation means even more time for teens to browse and chat on the Internet with even less adult supervision.

"It used to be that you didn't have to see the playground bully 'til the next school day," said Renee Arcement, a Kitsap mother and administrator with the state's Youth Suicide Prevention Program. "Nowadays with the Internet, it's a form of bullying [kids] can't get away from."

Teenage bullying is nothing new. Hormones kick in, development spurs, and as "kids are trying to figure out who they are, part of that means challenging others," said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Eugene, Ore.-based Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use and author of "Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress."

But the Internet has taken bullying to new heights, allowing users to post anonymous comments, leave them online indefinitely, and show them off to a bandwagon with equal bandwidth.

A physical encounter may lead kids to pick their words more carefully. Online, however, they'll say almost anything, Arcement said.

"One kid may say, 'I just wish you'd go kill yourself,'" she said as an example of a MySpace message post. "Other kids turn around and say, 'Just do it.'"

And bullying and other forms of harassment over the Internet don't often stay there, Arcement said.

"If it's happening online, chances are it's happening in the classroom," she said.

It's sometimes impossible to track down the cyberbully. Unless the bullying also occurs at school, which unfortunately is the place it likely rears its most ugly head, administrators can't do much more than alert police and their staff if the case is serious enough.

"We don't have resources to take your home computer," Villars said.

At times, cyberbullying cases do reach a level of possible criminal prosecution. Todd Dowell, a Kitsap County deputy prosecutor working in the juvenile division, said a smattering of incidents have come to his office for review. More likely, he says, is that cyberbullying is a part of an overall harassment case, with incidents online and off.

The bigger problem in his mind is a generation of kids whose lives are open books. That leaves them vulnerable to not only cyberbullying and online harassment, but also to strangers and friends with nefarious intentions.

"When you have these accounts, you are opening your life up," Dowell said. "Kids may not realize the dangers involved."