STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- For some bullying victims, there's no escape.
Cruel taunts that decades ago would have been left in the schoolyard can follow them everywhere, popping up as Facebook notifications and appearing in text message inboxes. Sometimes the taunts are worse than in-person abuse/ Sometimes, the comments can come from strangers hiding behind usernames, or from peers attacking anonymously.
"People feel emboldened, and they are definitely more likely to say and do things they wouldn't do in person," said Dr. Elizabeth Englander psychology professor and director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center.
And for teenagers, dealing with the taunts can be particularly difficult.
"It's not easy for adults to handle. But for younger people, who often feel isolated, it can feel inescapable on some level," said Dr. Katie Cumiskey, associate professor of psychology at the College of Staten Island.
LEGAL ACTIONS
With the rise of forms of technology and social media that keep people constantly connected, bullying is just one more aspect of life that has gone digital. But with "cyberbullying" becoming a major topic of concern, it could soon become illegal in New York.
Laws like those will come too late for Amanda Cummings, a 15-year-old New Dorp High School sophomore. Miss Cummings died after being struck by a bus on Hylan Boulevard. Police said she was carrying a suicide note, and witnesses said she stepped in front of the vehicle.
Police are still investigating allegations that Miss Cummings was bullied by peers at New Dorp High School while she was alive -- including through nasty text messages. But there's no doubt that Miss Cummings, her family, friends and mourners were subject to vicious cyberbullying after her death.
A page set up in her memory was bombarded with cruel messages, mean comics and photoshopped images of buses. The content wasn't the work of the peers who might have bullied her during high school -- instead, it was Internet "trolls," mostly strangers, picking on her for the sake of picking on her. A post on the /b/ message board of website 4chan.org -- notorious for bullying other teenagers in the past and for posting obscene material -- urged people to take to her memorial page and mock her.
BRUTALITY GLAMORIZED
"I think we do live in a world that glamorizes brutality and meanness," Dr. Cumiskey said. "And there's a devaluing or seeing weakness in people who actually are honest about their feelings."
The type of behavior witnessed on the memorial page could become illegal in New York, if a bill introduced by Sen. Jeffrey D. Klein (D-Bronx/ Westchester) is passed. The bill would create a new legal definition of "electronic communication, and would allow for stalking charges to be pressed when someone uses electronic communication to fear or harm someone under 21, and an aggravated harassment charge for electronic communications meant to harass, annoy, threaten or annoy people.
"Over years we've told our kids to turn the other cheek, sticks and stones can break your bones but word can't hurt you," he said. "I think we've seen that words can kill."
In addition to the bill, Klein and the Independent Democratic Conference, which includes Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn), is also spearheading the first ever New York Cyberbullying Census, and has released reports on cyberbullying. Klein said there is no data on how big a problem cyberbullying is in the state.
"When I was growing up, you had a fight in the schoolyard with the schoolyard bully and it ended there," he said. "Now you have these taunts taking place by these invisible bullies that are acting on the Internet."
But not everyone thinks the laws targeting cyberbullying are a good idea. Dr. Izzy Kalman, a school psychologist and director of Bullies2Buddies, said police and society at large cannot protect children from Internet bullying.
"I teach kids that if you are going to get on the Internet, you have to be prepared that bad things are going to happen and you have to deal with it," Dr. Kalman said.
Dr. Kalman said children should either ignore the bullying, or treat the bully as a friend, since it's difficult to continue to be mean to someone friendly to you. What the bully wants is to see someone upset, he said.
"There are all kinds of ways to respond without getting upset," he said. "And then you're not a loser and it's no fun to keep on tormenting you."
Dr. Kalman said the way bullying is approached in school -- by teaching that no one should ever bully you because it's so awful -- only makes children feel worse when they do get bullied. He suspected that, and the copycat effect of bully victims reading about others in the media, are behind what seems to be a recent uptick in news about victims dying by suicide. "Unwittingly, all of these anti-bullying lessons are making kids more vulnerable to bullying, more upset by bullying," he said.
Dr. Englander said has studied those who are resilient to bullying, and those who are vulnerable to it -- and do something drastic, like suicide.
"Kids who are vulnerable almost always have other issues they are struggling with," she said. "It's almost never a situation of they're fine and things are fine, and they are bullied and they do something drastic."
BEHIND THE BULLYING
The Internet can make people meaner -- in person, cues like facial expressions or body language often tell a person when to stop, Dr. Englander said. Those cues and social factors are absent online. When it happens, parents sometimes just think children should shut off the computer, she said.
"What they really don't get is it's such a central way that kids communicate," she said. "Even if a victim turns it off, they know every else isn't turning it off."
Dr. Cumiskey agreed there isn't a generally accepted set of social rules or etiquette for online behavior the way there is in live interactions.
"There's this anonymity and sort of mob mentality that takes over when you are in the role of the technology user," she said, referring to the 'online disinhibition effect.'
Facebook has encouraged people to communicate using their true identity -- though those attacking Ms. Cummings created fake accounts on the site -- but many sites allow anonymous usernames. Dr. Cumiskey pointed out that one of them is silive.com, the Advance's home on the Web.
"A lot of people sort of quote-unquote hide behind their usernames, and the things they say online might not be the kinds of things they would say to their neighbors out on the street," she said.
While some people may be tempted to say Facebook is a bad thing, Dr. Cumiskey called the Internet, Facebook and other social media ambiguous stimuli. "How we use it is what infuses it with positivity or negativity," she said.
LACK OF UNDERSTANDING
The adolescents who use it negatively don't understand the full consequences of their actions -- their brains aren't developed enough, Dr. Cumiskey said. Those being bullied, she said, don't fully understand that the ridicule to which they are being subjected isn't the end of the world.
For children, communicating by social media feels more important than doing so face to face, she said. They can be reluctant to go to their parents about problems encountered there.
"Just being an adolescent can be a very isolating experience," she said. "That's part of adolescent development -- you're trying to find out who you are as a person who is independent or separate from your family as you move into adulthood."
Often it is impossible to know a drastic response to bullying or other teenage troubles could be coming. But sometimes there are cries for help. What Miss Cummings' family is going through is anguishing, Dr. Cumiskey said. But parents might be able to learn something from what happened to Miss Cummings -- particularly since the girl had mentioned death on her Facebook before.
"If a child says, 'I want to die,' or 'Kill me,' or 'F my life,'" and we see it, as adults, we need to intervene and say 'Are you serious?'" she said. "What I'm learning from this situation is, if I see this on a kid's Facebook, I'm going to say 'What's up?'"