Tuesday, January 18, 2011

School-based Social Workers Unsure about Dealing with Cyberbullying

A recent study reports that almost half of school-based social workers do not feel prepared to handle cases of cyberbullying, even though they recognize it as a problem.

I read this, and felt sad -- mostly because dealing with cases of cyberbullying should not be all that different from dealing with cases of face-to-face bullying. Sure, technology-based bullying may be harder to discover because it's not overhead in the hallways, but the interventions should be the same -- support the youth being bullied, identify perpetrators and decide on adequate consequences for their actions (interesting idea coming out of the UK -- have bullied students help decide punishment). But maybe the fact that 20% of the respondents believed that their school's policy on cyberbullying was inadequate had something to do with them feeling ill-prepared? I honestly don't know how much school personnel rely on policy to back up their actions. Anyone out there want to speak out on that?

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