Bully for you!

How to deal with the hotbed of hatred that goes by the name of the Internet

Cyber bullying has been much in the news of late. And it spawned a fresh set of stories after the wife of the Republican contender for the US Presidency, Melania Trump, gave a robotic stump speech to announce that she would work on combatting cyber bullying if she ever became First Lady. Once we had stopped pointing and laughing -- and asking her if she had ever met her husband, the Insulter-In-Chief, Donald Trump -- it was difficult to disagree with the substance of what Melania said.

You only have to spend ten minutes on the Internet to realise what a hotbed of hatred it has become. Clearly the anonymity that the net offers does something strange to people. It brings forth their worst instincts. It encourages them to spew abuse and insults from their safe havens in front of their keyboards. It turns otherwise rational and sane human beings into a raging mob spitting expletives and vomiting bile. It makes them think nothing of throwing stuff at you that they would never dream of saying to your face.

So, yes, Melania had it right when she spoke about how "We have to find a better way to talk to one another, to disagree with each other, to respect each other."

But she is quite the wrong messenger to put out this message. After all, every night she lies down to sleep beside Donald Trump, who is prone to go on vicious tweet storms in the early hours of the morning, asking people to check out (non-existent) sex tapes of former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado. So if Melania really wants to fight cyber bullying then she should start with the bully snoring gently next to her. Confiscating his phone and deleting his Twitter account would be a good start.

But I am guessing that is not going to happen any time soon. And even if we try and take comfort in the hope that after November 8 we won't have to bother very much about what Donald Trump has to say (am writing this before America goes to the polls, so knock wood) cyber bullying will still be a clear and present danger.

Like most women who have an online presence I have been subjected to my fair share of cyber bullying over the years. The abuses remained much the same. They were always some variation on calling me a 'prostitute', wishing that I would be 'raped' (except that I was too unattractive for any man to bother), calling me fat or ugly (or both), ah well, you get the drift. But over time my way of coping with the steady stream of vitriol did evolve and change.

My initial response to all the sexist abuse on such platforms as Twitter was to hit back hard. I would reply to every abusive tweet and tie myself up in futile exchanges that did nothing other than exasperate, infuriate, and even debilitate me. After a few months of this, I realised that what they say about wrestling with pigs is true: you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it.

All I was really doing with my instant responses and cutting repartee was feeding the beast. I was just encouraging bad behaviour instead of cutting it off. I was giving cyber bullies the space to function and thrive instead of cutting off their oxygen supply.

So, I decided to change tack. Now, instead of replying to these angry cyber warriors I would just draw attention to their illiterate rants in a suitably high-minded manner. Thus began a brief phase when I would retweet the most vile tweets with a pithy comment like "Your mother would be so proud of you". The hope was to name and shame the most vicious offenders so that they thought twice about using language like this again.

I know, silly me. What was I thinking? All I did achieve by retweeting the messages of these trolls, who sometimes had less than a hundred followers, was allow them access to a larger audience on my timeline. And boy, did they revel in the attention this got them!

It was time to roll out another strategy -- and this one has served me well to this day. It's called Zero Tolerance. I block anyone who is abusive towards me. I block those who bully and abuse others. I block those who spout communal nonsense on my timeline. I block those who retweet this kind of nonsense. It is an endless process; block a dozen trolls and a hundred others spring forth to take their place. But despite the occasional moments of despair, I keep at it.

Is it a viable solution to cyber bullying? Of course not. But it is a good start to keeping cyber bullies out of my space. My logic is simple: I would not tolerate this kind of behaviour from people in real life; so why should I tolerate it on the Net? Anyone who behaved like that in my home would not be invited back. So, why would I allow such louts on my timeline, which is my virtual drawing room?

Which is why I don't have much use for Melania Trump's claims of combatting cyber bullying. If she can't deal with the bully in her bed, what hope is there for her taking on those hiding in the dark shadows of the Net?

Eom

I spy

Is it ever a good idea to snoop on your children?

It is a scary time to be the parent of teenager. You don’t just have to cope with the ready availability of drinks and drugs, though that is hard enough. With the virtual mainstreaming of porn (available to anyone at the click of a mouse) sex is also a danger zone. Sexting, or sending sexually explicit pictures via phone texts, is rampant among the teenage population. Peer pressure forces kids to become sexual players long before they are ready for sex at an emotional level.  Sexual predators lurk in chat rooms and social media sites to prey on the young and the vulnerable. And the real world is scarcely safer, with reports of rapes and molestations coming in every day.

Combine this with the natural inclination of all kids to turn into monosyllabic creatures of mystery as soon as they hit puberty and you have a huge problem. Just when your children seem to be most vulnerable, their world is closed to you. And the only way to get even a glimpse is (not to put too fine a point on it) by snooping.

The good news is that spying on your kids has never been easier. You can use the GPS on their mobiles to track their whereabouts throughout the day. There are apps that will allow you to monitor their on-line activity – which sites they visited, what software they downloaded, etc – without their being any the wiser. And you can lurk in the corners to check out what they are posting on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (or get someone else to do the lurking for you).

But just because something is easy, should you do it? And what will you do with the information you glean? There is no way you can use it without admitting that you have been spying. And once you admit that, what will be the repercussions on your relationship with your kids? Will they ever forgive you for invading their privacy? Will they ever trust you again, given that trust goes both ways? What if they rebel against this helicopter parenting and become even more secretive than before? Given their competitive advantage in matters of technology, this is one battle you may never win.

Yet, there is no denying that our children are vulnerable on the Net. Cyber-bullying is rampant, and is sometimes so ferocious that it leads kids to kill themselves. Girls as young as 13 are pressured into sending ‘sexy’ pictures of themselves to their boyfriends; who then circulate them among their friends when the ‘relationship’ ends. And you only have to read reports about the Steubenville rape to see how Instagram, Twitter and other social networks are used to humiliate and shame.

So, when it comes right down to it, would you spy on your teenager? And does it ever turn out well?

Well, the jury is out on that one. I know parents who predicate their relationship with their teenage kids on trust and allow them their space. They respect the boundaries their kids put up and their children respond by being open and sharing their lives with them. But this hands-off attitude doesn’t work for everyone – and may even be downright dangerous for some.

On the other extreme, there are parents who believe that knowledge is power and maintain a constant surveillance on their kids. And while their kids may stay safe as a consequence, their relationship with their children does not exactly flourish. The kids resent the constant interference; and the implication that they are not to be trusted.

So what is a parent to do? It’s a tough one. You can’t really abdicate all responsibility for keeping your kids safe on the grounds that they are entitled to their privacy. On the other hand, you don’t want to be so intrusive that they shut themselves off from you forever. It is a fine line that separates caring from smothering; and parents will find themselves on the wrong side of it one time or another.

But the perils of prying work both ways. In one of my favourite episodes of Modern Family, Claire Dunphy joins Facebook and badgers her two teenage daughters into accepting her friend request in the hope of keeping tabs on their lives. But the tables are turned when an embarrassing photo of Claire – in her wild college days – is posted on Facebook by one of her old friends. It is Claire who is left red-faced as she tries (and fails) to delete the image. 

There is a lesson for us all there. Just as there is some stuff you don’t want your kids to know about you, there is some stuff that your kids don’t want to share with you. It’s all a part of growing up, becoming their own person, inhabiting their own world. And whether it is real life or the virtual world, you have to learn to let go.

That said, I have to admit that spying by parents can teach kids a valuable lesson: that nothing you post on the Internet, no matter how well you monitor your privacy settings, is ever private. Each photo, Facebook post or tweet will live on forever in the ether. The only way to keep things really private is to keep them off the Net. But to delight of spying parents everywhere, that’s one thing Generation Next seems incapable of doing.