Anti-Bullying Apps Are Fashionable. However Do They Work?

Regardless of nationwide efforts to foreground measures to forestall bullying—together with annual campaigns like Nationwide Bullying Prevention month—bullying stays a critical public well being difficulty. Tech builders have responded to this disaster with, predictably, extra expertise. From apps that help dad and mom in educating their kids about bullying, to expertise that purports to report and monitor incidents within the second, there isn’t any dearth of downloadable options for anybody in search of a response to this drawback.

I had already graduated highschool in New York Metropolis by the point the primary bullying prevention regulation was enacted in 1999. Within the close to quarter-century because the state of Georgia took the lead in criminalizing bullying, all 50 states have, in a single kind or one other, taken motion to handle this drawback. Whereas I’m glad to see progress made on this entrance, it’s too little too late for individuals who moved by college with targets on their backs, as I had. It’s due to my very own experiences that I observe discussions about anti-bullying efforts with nice curiosity—and likewise a wholesome dose of skepticism.

The Tech-Based mostly Elephant within the Room

As an educator, I’ve seen firsthand how college directors typically discuss a superb recreation in the case of their college’s “no-nonsense” or “zero-tolerance” bullying insurance policies. Stroll into any college, and also you’re prone to see at the least one anti-bullying poster hanging up within the halls, some even created by college students themselves. However as a trainer and a survivor of maximum abuse by the hands of a number of of my former friends, I do know firsthand that modern-day anti-bullying legal guidelines, insurance policies, and apps are solely as efficient because the adults keen to implement them.

It stays true that not all college officers take bullying complaints significantly, as was the case with one college district in California that was not too long ago discovered complicit within the digital bullying marketing campaign in opposition to one among its college students. The district was ordered to pay out 1 million {dollars} in damages to the teenage sufferer. In accordance with NBC Information, “The gross negligence by College, Lecturers, Principal, and District resulted in important bodily and psychological trauma to Claimant.”

As I encounter such tales, I can’t assist however wonder if and the way anti-bullying expertise might make a distinction for victims, but in addition their aggressors. In accordance with Kati Morton, licensed marriage and household therapist, media character, and creator of the e book Traumatized: Establish, Perceive, and Address PTSD and Emotional Stress, in counting on expertise to handle the issue of bullying, we’re wanting outward for options that is perhaps inward. “I don’t actually see expertise being efficient. We have to have extra conversations, and this must be face-to-face with dad and mom. We additionally want trainer intervention,” she mentioned. With cyberbullying defining a lot of how kids now expertise bullying, Morton believes that “we have to take options offline.”

It could appear, additionally, that some expertise has positioned the onus of discovering an answer squarely within the palms of the targets. Requiring victims to do extra work to realize security in areas the place security ought to be a given (equivalent to colleges) doesn’t appear proper to some psychological well being consultants. “We’re placing this duty on the particular person being harm to obtain an app and take these further steps. We have to take care of the people who find themselves bullying. There have to be penalties,” Morton says.