Bullying has been in the news lately, but the revelations about Gordon Brown’s alleged shoving and swearing have diverted attention from another kind of aggressive behaviour which is on the increase and which seems to be going unchecked.
Internet bullying has seen very few prosecutions, but causes daily misery for victims and can end in suicide.
Social networking sites are hugely popular with British young people – about half are members, with 5.2 million 13 to 19-year-olds signed up to Facebook.
It’s a great way of swapping news and staying in touch, but the downside can be tremendous, with one in three saying they’ve been bullied online.
Social networking sites are impossible to police because of the sheer volume of material, with the result that a huge amount of content is highly controversial.
A quick trawl shows how gangs use these sites to post threatening material intended to impress rivals and scare off detractors.
Stuart Cunningham, from Warwickshire, posted a repulsive picture of himself in a mask brandishing a large knife on one site.
He’s a member of a gang called the Overslade Crew, in Rugby, where up to six rival gangs are fighting over territory and a series of fires culminated in the death of an elderly couple.
The internet is the place where these gangs post their threats and brandish their weapons, and yet the police seem powerless to do anything about it until someone has been harmed.
The internet allows young people to glorify violence, to pose as ‘soldiers’ in their version of urban warfare and intimidate whoever they please.
Rhys Jones was murdered in Liverpool in 2007 by a member of the Croxteth Crew, and five other gang members were convicted.
The Croxteth Crew and their local rivals posted lurid pictures of themselves on social networking sites for months before the murder.
Brandishing guns and knives is one form of aggression; sarcasm and innuendo is another.
Last week, an inquest heard that 15-year-old Holly Grogan committed suicide by jumping off a bridge after being bullied on Facebook.
There are countless other examples of young people killing themselves because they could not deal with this modern form of torture.
Megan Gillan, 15, took a drugs overdose last January. Sam Leeson, 13, and Rachel Jarvis, 12, hanged themselves in 2009. In 2007, Stephanie Burlingham, 14, and Casey Knibbs, 13, killed themselves.
Last November, 29 pupils were suspended from a Church of England secondary school in West London after making nasty comments about a teacher on Facebook. They called themselves The Hate Society, and one pupil said: ‘It’s our right to be able to express ourselves.’
Another Facebook group, which has 7,000 members, publishes pictures of women its members claim are promiscuous and calls them ‘grims’. Perfectly innocent people have no way of knowing if they are on this site.
There have been very few prosecutions for the new offence of internet bullying in this country.
But in Italy last month, a judge gave three Google executives suspended jail sentences after a video was posted online in 2006 showing the bullying of an autistic child. It was only deleted after two months, after millions of people had seen it, when a children’s charity made a formal complaint.
Google has said the sentence ‘poses a grave threat to the freedom of internet users’, and plans an appeal.
There have been similar complaints from the U.S. government and various anti-censorship campaign groups around the world.
Of course, freedom of expression is to be cherished, but allowing children unlimited access to social networking sites which have no way of controlling their material before it goes online is very disturbing.
The rise of gang culture has been facilitated by the internet. Some young people see no difference between the fantasy world of computer games and the real world they live in, which is why someone thought that pictures of a disabled child being attacked made great entertainment.
Holly Grogan died because of freedom of expression. A high price to pay?
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