Cyberbullying

Practices

• Teach your children to respect the feelings of others: The best way to combat cyberbullying is to prevent it from ever happening. Teach your children that their online actions have real-world consequences and can really hurt people. The MindOH! Foundation's  Web site provides act ivities you can do with your child to discuss cyberbullying and its effects.

• Know what your child is doing online: Cyberbullying is allowed to go on because it takes place in a private online world that teenagers have created. Keep the computer in a central location in the house, and monitor your child's online activities. If your child seems upset after being online, he may be the victim of cyberbullying.

• Trace threatening emails or text messages: If your child receives threatening or harassing emails, save them as evidence. Forward them to abuse@<domain name of provider> (the domain name follows the @ sign in the cyberbully's email address), and request that the cyberbully's account be terminated. If the harassment is by phone text message, contact your phone company to trace the sender. If the threats are severe enough, contact your local police for help.

• Have offensive Web sites removed: If threats or offensive comments about your child are being posted on a Web site, you can contact the hosting company to request that the site be taken down. You can find the host of the Web site by going to Whois.net  and typing in the Web site address.

• Contact your child's school: Schools can do little to stop cyberbullying since it usually takes place off of school grounds. However, the school may be able to provide counseling or mediation between your child and the cyberbully if they attend the same school.

• Talk to your children about cyberbullying: Teach your children that they can come to you with any problems they are having with cyberbullies. Make sure that they understand that you will not take away their Internet privileges, since this fear keeps many kids from reporting cyberbullying.

Settings

• Email filter: Set your child's email account to send all messages from a cyberbully to a specific folder. That way you can save them as evidence without them going to your child's inbox. To do this in Hotmail :
  1. Click on Options in the upper right hand corner, and go to Custom Filters.
  2. Click New Filter.
  3. Select the option "are from the e-mail address:", and enter the cyberbully's email address.
  4. Select the option "New Folder", and type in a name for the folder you want the harassing emails to go to. Click OK.
  5. On the next screen you will see the filter that you have just created. Check the box next to it.

• Block the IM accounts of cyberbullies: If cyberbullying is occurring over IM, you can stop the harasser from contacting you. In both MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger, you can block a user by clicking the Block button in the chat window.

Tools

• Email tracking software: Cyberbullies are often able to remain anonymous because they can hide behind an email address. Software such as eMailTrackerPro  can trace the computer that an email came from and automatically report harassing emails to the cyberbully's ISP.