Help - dd is a FB bully

[01march2011]

Have name changed. Posted here cos it's busy...

What do I do. DD is just 13 and has been cyber bullying a girl who was her friend. School now involved and police too apparetnly. Going to see them tomorrow. Don't know what to expect.

DDs emails indicate she knows police and school involved but we knew nothing of this till a phone call from school this morning.

Am sat here in tears not knowing where the hell we went wrong, or what to expect from the meeting tomorrow, or why on earth she turned out like this. She's normally a model child, friendly, hard working, bright, mature....

Any words of wisdom?

i would take away ALL privilaeges for a very long time, everything she holds dear would be gone until she started acting responsibly and like a decent person.

as for wasting police time - your daughter is the one wasting it for them by bullying some other child.

GiddyPickle "And that's why people go straight to the police with these things nowadays. "

Do you not think that people go to the police because bullying is recognized as a serious issue/crime, yet schools have no powers to stop it? Were my kids bullied I would have no, NONE, hesitation to go to police, school, parents of all concerned.

sorry, on the second read agree with you GiddyPickle I should stop running to the computer when I am cleaning

GiddyPickle... I was the poster who said that bullies are generally followers, I think OP just agreed with that in that there were others involved also. She wasn't negating (or I didn't read it as such), that her DD wasn't in the wrong and that the bullied girl hadn't suffered.

I'm really interested in cricketballs's comments... I've often wondered how the school, specifically the teachers, are supposed to deal with issues like this when all the punitive powers have been removed. You can't sanction a child nor exclude it... what exactly is the 'school' supposed to do? I'm incensed at the threads I read where mothers feel entitled to storm 'up the school' to demand explanations and sanctions for the teachers who've deigned to correct a child's appalling behaviour. School times have really changed and it isn't for the better.

RevoltingPeasant... I'd say that was an assumption, OP didn't say anything about physical violence. Police forces across the UK don't necessarily respond in a consistent way to allegations. I'd suspect that the headteacher has requested their involvement, possibly the parents of the girl too, but all will become clear when the OP has her meeting tomorrow and will possibly find out further things of which she's currently unaware.

bemybebe... Exactly, having good children doesn't mean that something like this can't happen. You can teach parameters all you like but unless an incident happens that you can use as an example, it's really difficult. I hope I never experience this, every parent would hope the same, but it happens in spite of everything.

LeeLoo...that was exactly my point. Kids can go too far, sometimes far too far and parents can be completely unaware of incidents unless or until they are reported. I do think that some incidents are completely exaggerated and spiteful or mischievous bantering that all children do suddenly become calls of bullying.

I'm supportive of the OP because I know that this can happen to anyone, I think she's been unfairly rounded upon for not mentioning specific remorse for the other child and her comment about the police. I can understand where she's coming from, her immediate thoughts are prioritised on her DD and the likely implications of this incident and she sounds completely beside herself with worry. :(

LyingWitchInTheWardrobe - "You can't sanction a child nor exclude it... what exactly is the 'school' supposed to do?" exactly........

I have known instances where students have been physically abusive to staff members and are still in that school as there is nothing that could be done

LyingWitchInTheWardrobe "her immediate thoughts are prioritised on her DD and the likely implications of this incident"

You hit the nail on the head. To me her priority seem to ensure that the consequences of her dd's behaviour are minimized. To me this is a wrong priority, it will not help her dd in the long run and I do judge her for that.

OP. I'm glad you've taken on board the issues re some of your flippant comments 'silly teenage girls' and 'Police catching real criminals'. Unfortunately it made you look like you didn't really take it seriously and one can't help but wonder if that's why your daughter thought this appalling behaviour was ok.

Anyway exactly this happened to a friend of mine. They are a lovely hardworking professional family and never been in trouble with the Police. They were also called up to the school when their 13 year old daughter was reported for cyber bullying a friend of hers. It turned out several girls had been bullying this poor girl but after some investigation it turned out that it stemmed from an ill advised comment made by friends daughter with regards to a photo of the friend on FB. Friend wasn't one of the cool ones because she worked hard, was cleaver, didn't wear trendy clothes and had no interest in boys.

My friend said the Police gave her daughter a real serious talking to and gave her an official harassment warning stating that if she ever harrassed the girl again she would be arrested for harassment. My friend was mortified but totally supportive of the Police action.

She also rang the mother of the friend (who she knew pretty well) to apologise and ask if it would be appropriate for her daughter to apologise to the girl. She also deactivated her FB account and only now two years later is she allowing her heavily supervised FB access. She also had her phone taken off her and only when they felt appropriate did they allow her to get it back.

The reason why this all came about was her daughter wanted to be one of the 'cool' group and apparently this involved turning her back on and mocking her 'swotty friend'

Children developing 'e-personalities' online is one of the darker sides of the internet. For some reason they don't comprehend that it is actually a public place and behave online in a way that they would never dream of in real life.

You need to discuss this with her, banning Facebook et al isn't the answer, teaching your child how to conduct themselves online is key.

Kids also don't "get" the fact that they leave a digital footprint that will follow them for years and can affect employment prospects. Our school has run several lessons on this for SE classes.

It can't be just "silly teenage bullying" The police have been called in. Would you be seeing it that way if it was your daughter being bullied?

Depending on how serious and protracted this bullying was, I would think the police will be thinking in terms of a triage intervention. This is a non-criminal disposal where specially trained officers/YOT team workers arrange a series of sessions (usually including a face to face meeting with the victim) to work through the issues surrounding what has happened.

Not saying that will definitely happen, but quite likely. There will probably be a formal interview before that decision can be made though and you may want to obtain legal advice and have a solicitor attend the police station with you.

It really worries me - all this access to social networking sites, Blackberries and Smart phones etc.
Youngsters do have a tendency to act on impulse and before the internet/mobile phone access their less-than-desirable actions didn't have such a wide audience.
Nowadays, at the touch of a button there can be hundreds of people reading a posting/receiving a text within seconds.
I agree about being careful to take this very seriously OP - we had our share of angst with our own DD years back when she was young and we had to send very clear messages about actions and consequences. A hard esson to learn but necessary.

I would say grounding and an apology would be the least the OP's daughter can look forward to. This sounds like a concentrated and intentional bullying campaign. If the police are involved and the school thought it serious enough to escalate to that level, there is clearly a real problem.

I feel sorry for the victim, not an ounce of sympathy for what the OP's daughter has coming in form of punishment.

I do feel for the OP though, not nice to find out your DD is a bully.

I am sure that this has been ruled out but this happened to someone I know but it turned out not to have been her dc at all.Someone else at school had effectively set up an account in their name ,i.e. stealing their identity to wage war on someone else .It was a nightmare ,the whole fb thing is fraught with danger

Still too shocked to post too much, but the facts following the meeting are:
Fake fb account been active for a six months ? dd set it up because we insisted on monitoring her proper account.
She and the victim have had an on-going friends/not-friends relationship for months ? fairly typical teenage stuff.
Things kicked off a few days ago when a fb chat they were having dissolved into massive arguments.
Dd was very upset and wanted to lash out at the girl, remembered the fake fb account and used this.
She posted two comments ? both of the ?no-one likes you? ilk ? neither threatening anything physical. Unfortunately dd is popular, the other girl isn?t so very quickly there were two dozen other posters clicking ?like? on these comments.
The other girl was obviously devastated at all of this and her parents called the police.
The police and school consider it entirely appropriate for school to deal with things.
Dd will be punished ? school are deciding exactly how in conjunction with the victim. She is grounded and now allowed internet for a month.
Dd is totally full of remorse, didn?t think through what she was doing and prepared to accept the consequences.
No-one else was involved.

Thanks for the update march, now you know the details and can deal with the situation as you feel is appropriate. Good luck to you and your dd!

Firstly you have my sympathy - it sounds like you are really shocked and upset by this.

Secondly, it does sound like this is a very short-term, almost one-off thing, and has been caught early which is a good thing both for your dd, the girl she bullied, and for the other girls involved - your dd and the other girls will have got a real shock about the consequences of this kind of thing, and will think twice before doing it again, and as far as the victim is concerned, it sounds as if the school and her parents are being very supportive, and in my experience this will really help her to deal with what's happened so there isn't any long term damage - which is a lot less likely anyway as this is such a short term thing.

It also sounds as if you are dealing with this well - I would just add some sort of reparation to the victim (a letter from your dd, a public apology, perhaps some sort of gift in compensation, maybe).

Oh, and it is good that your dd is taking this on the chin, and showing genuine remorse.

I would love to meet or contact my bullies again, to see if they have any remorse for what they did to me, and for the years of pain and depression it caused - at the moment, I am stuck with seeing them as the teenage bullies, whereas of course they are in their mid-40s now, and probably have kids of their own - and may be very different people.

Perhaps if I had had the guts to keep telling my mum what was happening, it might have been dealt with at the time - I'm sure that if I had seen that my bullies were truly sorry (as your dd clearly is), it would have helped me immensely.

This happens almost on a daily basis at dd's school. The most popular girls pick on the not so popular ones and then all the cronies pile in. Bloody facebook should be banned off the face of this earth.

On the machine there is a hidden file called 'Hosts'

It sits in /windows/system32/

add an extra line

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

This creates a loopback to the home machine for those requests, meaning she will never get there.

More discrete than parental controls and MUCH more powerful

U

ursus - sorry not getting you - a loopback to the home machine - what's a loopback? what does this do?

For the future, on the assumption this gets resolved and dd gets fb and email back, what can we do to record/check activity? Obviously lines of communication need to be kept open, but what else technically? Naively I thought monitoring her account regularly would be enough

I am sorry for you March. I really don't know. There are so many crafty ways for them to open accounts that you know nothing about. Some of the girls in my dd's class even have accounts open for toy cuddlies and their pets! I monitor my dd's account regularly and would just hope that nothing untoward is going on but you have had experience of that!

Maybe someone techie will have the answer.

01march2011 : from what i can remember, by doing what ursus says, whenever your daughter tries to get into facebook, this 'hosts' file acts as a kind of pointer and points the facebook page back to your own machine (127.0.0.1 is a pointer back to your own machine).. facebook will have its own ip address which will never be reached cos the hosts file takes over first and doesn't let your pc find the correct ip address (hope that makes sense)

OK so she views fb on her pc rather than fb's own servers, so what she views and posts is immediately identificable as coming from her pc? Is that right? what does this do then. Does this make it easy for someone to say it was her netbook that the posts came from? How could I (or anyone else) do that? And how does this protect her from stuff being siad about her?

Apologies - not very techie minded here.