New Age Bullies

School bullying is one of the fastest growing crimes in America. While I feel that schools have started heading in the right direction and taking action against bullying, I think they still have a long way to go. With more advanced technologies such as the cell phone and instant messaging, students can now cyber bully other students and these days, words can hurt a lot. Due to the recent increase of bullying attacks in the past few years, schools have started taking a more aggressive approach in preventing violence among students.

Experts say that as many as one in 10 children are bullied at school. Each day, about 160,000 U.S. students miss school because they are afraid of facing a bully. (Time for Kids) Thirty-two percent of students ages 12 to 18 nationwide had experienced bullying within the 2007 school year, according to a report by the U.S. Education Department and the U.S. Justice Department. That number was slightly higher than the year before — though officials say it is not because bullying is more frequent, but because it is reported more often.

In the 10 years since the Columbine shootings, the development of new technologies - e-mail, texting, instant messaging - "has really presented a challenge to all of us," said Gloucester County School Superintendent Mark Stanwood. Organizers of a cyber-bullying conference in Gloucester County recently set the tone by showing the movie Sticks and Stones. In it, the popular Lindsay and loner Brandon share a high school English class. Though they rarely speak to each other, they exchange text messages in class and instant messages late at night. But when Lindsay's boyfriend gets into her computer, he sends a humiliating picture of Brandon to the entire school. One night he even messages Brandon from Lindsay's screen name, pretending to be her. When Brandon confesses his love, she tells him to "just disappear." He does. The movie ends with Brandon hanging himself from a bridge. "The crimes that are committed by...