LC students spread word about cyber bullying

Parents and teachers know to look out for physical bullying, said Alisha Walker Marciano, a psychology professor at Lynchburg College.

But what about when bullying comes in the form of an online message?

“More recently, people have been picking on each other through e-mail and texting and those kind of things,” Marciano said.

To draw awareness to the problem, a group of Marciano’s students have been visiting classes at Forest Middle and Jefferson Forest High schools. Throughout the semester, they’ll speak to nearly 40 classes about cyber bullying.

“A lot of times, the kids don’t know how harmful it can be,” said Allie Sypher.

She and Robyn Sharkey, both junior psychology majors at LC, spoke to two classes of seventh-graders at Forest Middle on Tuesday. They’ll speak to more students today.

“You really need to be careful with everything you say (online), even if it’s just a joke,” Sypher told students.

The two defined six types of cyber bullying:

- cyber stalking: the use of a computer to stalk someone.

- impersonation: pretending to be someone else online.

- denigration: spreading lies online about another.

- harassment: sending some-one repetitive, offensive mes-sages online.

- happy slapping: recording video of assaulting someone so it can be posted and shared online.

- trickery: tricking someone online to share information so it can be used to make fun of them.

“It’s mostly on MySpace or Facebook (social networking Web sites),” said seventh-grader Hannah Tyree. “Most of them probably don’t even know what cyber bullying is.”

Nancy Baumann, who teaches one of the classes that LC students visited Tuesday, said she already teaches a 10-day segment on bullying. Now, the schools may incorporate aspects of cyber bullying into that unit, she said.

“It’s scary that these kids are out there experiencing this,” she said.

Through visits to JF, Sypher said she was surprised to hear that students knew all about happy slapping.

“They were like, ‘it happens all the time,’” she said.

Students at the middle school level didn’t seem to know much about it, though.

Marciano has been studying cyber bullying for several years, and last year helped conduct a study on the topic.

Of 350 college students surveyed in Virginia and Illinois, she said, about 60 percent said they had experienced cyber bullying.

More recently, she’s been working on a similar study at JF and Forest Middle, but those results are not in yet, she said.

“Sometimes, kids will purposefully do things to hurt others,” Marciano said. “But other times, they don’t realize that what they do could be interpreted in a hurtful way.”

Seventh-grader Ty Lester said that learning about cyber bullying was “a good thing.”

“It gives people a good idea that they should think before doing it,” he said.