Concerned about cyberbullying? Here are 4 ways to stop it

Bullying among children is not as rare some may think.

In the Philippines, over 65% of students reported being bullied at least a few times a month, according to a 2018 study told by Child Protection Network executive director Bernie Madrid.

However, as children become more and more involved in the digital space, bullying doesn’t just happen physically anymore. It also happens online.

During a Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation webinar on cyberbullying Wednesday, various experts gave their advice and suggestions on how to stop this behavior, from honing a more compassionate home to empowering children to set boundaries.

1. Teachers should undergo training on cyberbullying.

Kim Jong-ki, a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee and founder of Blue Tree Foundation, shared that it’s best to conduct education about the topic through the school teachers.

“This is the easiest one and the most important one we have to do,” Kim Jong-ki said in Korean as translated by Lee Ji-sang, an international manager at Blue Tree Foundation. “Also the expense is the cheapest one.”

In South Korea, Blue Tree Foundation has deep partnerships and collaborations with schools.

Kim Jong-ki shared that they developed an app for Blue Tree Foundation that allows users to report if they had problems so they can prevent any incident in advance. The organization sends the report to the app user’s respective school personnel.

School teachers reporting on school violence was mandatory in South Korea, he said.

2. Teach compassion and kindness at home.

Although we can do a lot of changes on the school level, the circumstances and time students spend in school are limited, according to Kim Jong-ki.

That is why parents play an important role in stopping bullying, according to the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee.

According to clinical psychologist and family therapy practitioner Honey Carandang, family is important in solving this problem.

“Culture of violence and hate has dominated the internet,” she said. “Family, this is first where we learn compassion, kindness, or we don’t.”

She said to “focus on families as the first step, first place to really teach compassion versus violence.”

3. Teach children digital etiquette.

According to Lee Sun-yung, the team leader of Blue Tree Foundation’s research and counseling team, it is important to be a nice person on the internet and be equipped with digital etiquette.

“We need to teach children when to respond when cyberbullying is happening,” said Lee Sun-yung.

This etiquette, she said, could be taught with just the simple act of uploading a photo.

If a child is with someone in a photo and wants to upload the said photo on social media, parents or guardians should teach the minor to ask permission from the other person in the photo first before the photo is shared.

“Without their agreement, you should not upload the photo,” Lee Sun-yung said.

“Digital literacy is the first key on how to be nice in the world,” she added.

4. Empower children with critical thinking to stop being a bystander.

Ysrael “Ace” Diloy, senior advocacy officer for Stairway Foundation Inc., said it’s important for parents to equip their children with skills to survive both offline and online.

Online safety, he said, also meant empowering children with a protective behavior.

Kim Jong-ki also said that aside from focusing on the bully and the bullied, there’s also another important person in the equation: the bystander.

Lee Sun-yung said that with the current trend of gaining popularity from followers and the meme-oriented culture, many content could be passed off as just “humor.”

“Even if it should be illegal, it’s so convenient to distribute or consume them on the internet,” she said. Because it’s easy to produce and consume this kind of content, while staying anonymous, it may encourage children to think it’s normal to do harm online.

“It allows them to commit violence very easy and they consider it as a play. It creates cultural norm that expects other members to do the same ... To be a bystander they think it’s just humor,” said Lee Sun-yung.

According to Beacon School president Dina Paterno, it’s important to remember that children are like sponges. Their discerning skills are still being honed, so they should be taught on the boundaries that they should stand by.

“Parents should give boundaries to kids, what’s okay, what’s not. If you don’t give boundaries anything is okay, anything is possible,” she said.

Empowering the kids to think critically also means enabling them to become good citizens online and offline.

The parents could not be there all the time, said Paterno, so it’s important to allow them to question if something was okay or not.

“If they’re a bystander, if they know it’s not okay, then they can say something. People get complicit when no one is saying anything,” she added.

It’s important then, she said, to know “what the boundaries are, what a good citizen is and it’s okay to say something if something is not correct.”

Fr. Fidel Orendain SDB, president and dean of Don Bosco Technical College Cebu, also said that parents shouldn’t just monitor their kids but also give them talks on what’s right and wrong. – RC, GMA News