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                                                        Related Radio and Video Content

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                                                        Related Radio and Video Content

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                                          Summaries of Other Related Content By Emily Bazelon

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                                          Summaries of Other Related Content By Emily Bazelon

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The following three articles by Emily Bazelon, show her investigative journalism style and commitment to influence our culture in terms of how the culture relates to bullying and bullies. Bazelon uses real stories- intriguing, somewhat galling stories of torment, suicide, death, and vigilante heroism as hooks for exploring the multiple facets of bullying. Bazelon follows all the strings of these real stories and she doesn't back down from industry giants, or from the accused. She writes with a precise descriptive detail that brings a person alive for the reader. She writes so that the people are very real and pull on the reader's empathy, regardless of how cruel or hypocritical they may be-- Bazelon's compassion leads the reader into deep compassion.

She travels across the United States and into Europe to interview whomever she needs to interview to put the next piece of her puzzle together. She explores the issue of bullying from different angles, and through the body of her work she shows her drive to improve how we deal with bullying in schools, in our culture, and with our justice system. She investigates Anonymous's vigil antes, and describes them very humanly, with their grand intentions, foibles, and moral inconsistencies. She follows intriguing stories into the darker parts of the human psyche as related to social media, yet contextualizes it as part of our nature as humans throughout time.

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                                                                              CRITIQUES

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                                                                              CRITIQUES

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In sum, these three critiques appreciate Bazelon's work and deem it important. All convey that the book will conjure up some sort of pain, flashback, empathy, or fear for the reader. Although they all have different approaches, they all include some sort of tip from Bazelon's work, as they found it important and worthy enough to include in the critique, so even if the reader of the critique doesn't read Sticks and Stones, they'll still benefit from a bit of the wisdom. Each critique provides a summary of her work in some way, but each writer grasps on to different specifics in her writing to convey the meaning in her work.

Solomon is the only one of the three to give any criticism of Bazelon's work at all, noting that her work got a little confusing with a lack of a central thesis, but he sandwiches this criticism between honoring praise of her work and compassion. The other two don't seem to notice or mind a lack of thesis, but agree wholeheartedly with her compassion.

All three note that her compassion that even extends to the bullies. Each honors her in some way, and acknowledge Bazelon as a missional writer, aiming to make a difference with her craft.

All in all, her work is heralded as a worthy and influential read: relevant and prescriptive.

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Today's Bullied Teens Subject to 'Sticks and Stones' Online, Too

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Today's Bullied Teens Subject to 'Sticks and Stones' Online, Too

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An NPR Fresh Air Radio Presentation on Emily Bazelon's Book: Sticks and Stones

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When Emily Bazelon was in eighth grade, her friends fired her. Now a senior editor for Slate, Bazelon writes in her new book, Sticks and Stones: "Two and a half decades later, I can say that wryly: it happened to plenty of people, and look at us now, right? We survived. But at the time, in that moment, it was impossible to have that kind of perspective."

In Sticks and Stones, Bazelon explores teen bullying, what it is and what it isn't, and how the rise of the Internet and social media make the experience more challenging.

"It really can make bullying feel like it's 24/7," Bazelon tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. Comparing it with her own experience as a young teenager, she says that "when I got home from school, there was a break. I didn't have to deal with [my friends] directly, and I could sort of put myself back together in the afternoon and evening. Whereas now when you come home if you're a victim of bullying, you're likely to see this continue on a social media site or via texting."

For parents who grew up without the Internet, understanding the technology that is an integral aspect of today's kid culture is a struggle, she says. Her question regarding that generational gulf informs the book. A parent herself, Bazelon says that she wanted to think about what limits made sense to set as her children entered the online world.

To complicate matters further, there is the issue of what role schools should play in a teen's digital life.

"We don't make schools responsible for all the stuff that kids do at the movies or on the beach or walking down the street," Bazelon says, "and yet if there's a cruel thread on Facebook or Twitter or a bunch of mean harassing texts go around, it's very typical for parents to bring those into the school and ask for help because they naturally feel that since it's among students, the school should have some role. I think it's clear that schools can help kids and parents talk through these situations. What I think is much trickier is whether they can really take on the role of punishing, and ... are schools really set up to police all this behavior, and do we really want them to play that role?"

Interview Highlights
On teens' capacity for empathy
"We want to think that empathy is this natural quality we all have, and in fact, almost everyone is capable of empathy. But there are these moments in adolescence where kids freeze out these feelings. I spent a lot of time with some of the girls who were bullying Monique [who is profiled in the book], and in moments it chilled me to listen to how dismissive they were in talking about her. But in other reflective moments they would say things like, 'You know, I see that she's walking down the hall with her head hanging down and really doesn't have as many friends as she used to have.' So it wasn't that they were incapable of empathy, it was much more that they were in a culture in which they were being encouraged to be cruel to another kid to enhance their own status instead of really letting their feelings of empathy for her have an outlet."
On what Facebook could be doing to help stem cyberbullying
"Facebook has a lot of influence over kids who are mean. They know from their own data that when they tell kids that they've posted something inappropriate [and] they ask them to take it down, those kids don't re-offend. Facebook's line on this to me was that they have a very low recidivism rate, and so to me, that suggests that Facebook can really use its influence to the good with kids in a way it has been reluctant to do so far, because it doesn't want to be seen as uncool."
On one bullying situation that Bazelon feels was handled intelligently by school counselors and administrators
"[The guidance counselor] decided one of those relationships [among the three girls] was a pretty equal relationship, and she could sit two of the kids down together, and they had enough residual trust and liking for each other that they might be able to talk it out with her help. And she did that, and in fact the girls told me that they had found that helpful. But then when the girl who was really the main bully in this scenario ... this guidance counselor decided, you know, 'This isn't going to work to sit these kids down together because it may be that the bully will say what she thinks the adult wants to hear in the room, and then there will be all kinds of consequences once the kids leave.'

"And so with that girl she sent that girl to the principal - and in this school it was unusual for kids to get sent to the principal for discipline, he was kind of reserved for the harder cases - and I asked that girl what this meeting was like. She said, 'You know, he appealed to me for help. He said, 'Look, we have a problem and you're the one who can stop it.' And she liked the idea that he was turning to her and that she had had this moment with him, and so she cut it out. She said that she felt like she wanted to help him in the way he had asked."
On having not read The Feminine Mystique by her grandmother's second cousin Betty Friedan until a few months ago. Friedan gave Bazelon a copy of the book for Bazelon's bat mitzvah:
"It's such an embarrassing confession. First of all, I had this lovely copy, though I think I found it just too intimidating as a teenager. And then, second of all, I should have just taken a good women's history course in college. My husband read The Feminine Mystique in graduate school when he was getting a history Ph.D., but I just never got around to it. My only excuse for this is I think the ideas in that book have seeped so deeply into our culture that I felt like I didn't need to read it to understand the argument that Betty was making, although when I did finally read it I got a lot out of that."
On raising two sons
"I feel like it's the most important job I have as a feminist to raise two boys who are going to appreciate the women in their lives and support them in what they do. It's something I've benefited tremendously from with my husband, whose mother always worked and who takes for granted that what I'm doing is just as important as what he's doing, and that this is a shared enterprise we have in our family. ... We don't always pull it off so gracefully, but we're working it out together."

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Today's Bullied Teens Subject To 'Sticks And Stones' Online, Too

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In her new book, Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon explores teen bullying, what it is and what it isn't, and how the rise of the Internet and social media make the experience more challenging. "It really can make bullying feel like it's 24/7," she says.

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In Bullying Programs, A Call to Bystanders to Act

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In Bullying Programs, A Call to Bystanders to Act

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An NPR Radio Presentation by Tovia Smith- This introduces the concept of UPSTANDERS

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The documentary Bully opens in theaters Thursday, and the heated controversy over the appropriate rating for the film has frustrated many schools hoping to use it as a teaching tool.

Administrators have struggled to find effective ways to help curb bullying in their schools in recent years, and a growing number of bullying prevention programs have emerged to meet the demand.

Many schools started by cracking down on bullies, then later focused on propping up victims, with the hope of helping to make them "bully-proof." Now, they have shifted their efforts to people who witness bullying.
Fostering 'Upstanders'

"A few years back, I used to be a bystander," panelist Lee Tu, a student from Allston, Mass., tells the audience during a recent anti-bullying conference sponsored by Harvard University. Tu says she saw a fellow student "called a whore ... and I didn't really do anything."

But for most kids, it's a big leap to imagine they shoulder any blame for doing nothing when they see bullies in action.

"If they're not the person shoving someone in a locker, or they're not online spreading rumors, they think they are not part of the problem," says Marc Skvirsky, vice president of the organization Facing History and Ourselves.

Skvirsky helped create a study guide to accompany the Bully documentary. The guide focuses both on bystanders and what many anti-bullying campaigners call "upstanders": kids and adults who stand up to bullying when they see it.

If they're not the person shoving someone ... they think they are not part of the problem

"We really want students to really reflect on their choices and the consequences of indifference," Skvirsky says.

Erica Newell works with the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, or MARC, which provides schools free or low-cost programs aimed at combating bullying. Today, she's teaching middle-schoolers in the town of Medway about the power of bystanders.

Bullies are much like performers, she tells the crowd. Their audience, she says, are bystanders, "just sitting there watching, right? So they're not saying, 'fight, fight, fight,' - but they're also not doing anything."

"So who are they helping?" she asks. "The bully, right?"

Newell tells kids that she gets why they don't want to stand up to bullies. She understands they don't want to make themselves a target. But, she says, there are less risky options.

"Don't join in. It's OK to turn around and walk away," she says. "You don't have to be BFFs or sit together at lunch all the time. Something as simple as that is showing the victim support."
Changing Perceptions Of What's Cool
After the assembly, seventh-grader Carly Hundertmark says a friend once offered such a gesture to help her when she was bullied.

"She would always call me over to a different table and find [a] way out of the situation," Carly says. "And she was actually the one who told my mom, 'cause I didn't feel comfortable about it."

Part of what made it hard to talk about was that the bully was one of Carly's friends.

It was the same for Shannon McHugh. "In the movies, it's always a big tough guy who picks on the little nerd. But, it was my friend," Shannon says.

"We would all joke around ... but then, she kind of took it to the next level and it started getting meaner," she says. "And she took it to the next level, and the next - and she just turned and bullied all of us."

Westfield State University professor Elizabeth Stassinos says that's often the case. Kids often play both roles of bully and victim, and it's often hard to know who is engaging in aggressive or bullying behavior. That's why, she says, just cracking down on bullies is ineffective and why peer intervention is key.

"Kids themselves need to create new social norms where bullying is not cool, and create an environment where the cool way of dealing with bullying ... is for one kid to say to the kid who's aggressive, 'Hey, why are you hating on so-and-so all the time?'

"It's very much like drunk driving," Stassinos says. "It's more effective when a student takes the keys away from another student."

Making it cool to stand up to bullies may sound like a tall order, but it begins to seem a little less impossible when stars like Lady Gaga get into the game.

At Harvard last month, when she announced her new Born This Way Foundation aimed at combating bullying, she told kids it's on them to change their school culture.

"There is no law that can be passed," the pop star told the students. "I wish there was, because you know I'd be chained naked to a fence somewhere trying to pass it."

Indeed, some people feel that laws can do more harm than good. New Jersey recently passed the nation's strictest anti-bullying law, leaving schools with an 18-page "compliance checklist." One school made headlines for investigating a second-grader who said another kid had cooties.

Harvard education professor Rick Weissbourd says it's easy for adults to overreact.

"There's an allergy to kids experiencing any adversity," he says. "[But] we don't want adults intervening every time a kid teases another kid. We want kids to be able to learn how to develop coping strategies, and learn how to deal with conflict in constructive ways."
Not All Programs Created Equal
The MARC program spends nearly as much time defining what bullying isn't as what it actually is, but not all programs do. In fact, some experts say it's a bit like the Wild West in the fast-growing industry of bully-prevention programs. Anyone can peddle anything - and they do.

Massachusetts anti-bullying campaigner Joe Wojick, also known as "Joe the Biker," travels schools with his tough persona, rap songs and his motorcycle jacket to tell his story.

"When I was your age, they called me 'yubbie,'" he tells a group of students.

They may be compelling tales told with the best intentions, but Stassinos says schools should not be investing in programs that are not research-based.

"It's often a feel-good experience, but it's a one-off event, and it doesn't change the climate," she says. "It seems just like a horrible waste of money to fund programs that aren't proven to work."

Stassinos says the evidence is clear about what works: the slow and tedious task of changing kids' hearts and minds about what's cool - and what's not, and convincing them to speak out against aggressive behavior.

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In Bullying Programs, A Call For Bystanders To Act

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A growing number of anti-bullying programs have emerged in recent years, and the focus of many has shifted from stopping bullies to encouraging bystanders to act. But in an industry where anyone can peddle virtually any kind of program, initiatives vary in their quality and effectiveness.

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Washington Post Book Review of Sticks and Stones, Review by Vinca LaFleur

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Washington Post Book Review of Sticks and Stones, Review by Vinca LaFleur

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Vinca LaFleur starts her review with a quote from the book about how instantly adults can remember with vivid clarity incidences of bullying from their youth, framing the issue as one that is age old, but attempts to stop it are relatively new. This is the general thrust of Sticks and Stones: Bazelon's research into the efforts to stop bullying.

Referencing Columbine as the impetus to our national effort to stop bullying, LaFleur traces Bazelon's inquiry into the online worlds, where teens access to social media makes bullying virtually inescapable. As students used to have a respite from torment when they were safe at home, online maleficence has the capability to invade the former safe-zones by virtue of their omnipresence.

LaFleur reveals her social perspective as a mother, and confesses the Pew Research data of 25% of teens reporting that something they experienced through social media made them nervous about going to school the next day combined with the authentic artifacts of cyberbullying quoted in the book could turn her into a Luddite. LaFleur clarifies that the intention of Bazelon's work isn't to scare, but to show that bullying is the same as it always has been, and it occurs in the spaces where teens hang out, and in our current world, they hang out online. LaFleur includes definition of bullying and reports how changing youth's perception of the norm of bullying actually changes the incidence of bullying. So, if they think it's the exception rather than the rule, then they're more likely to be upstanders- youth who stand up for other youth, or who stop bullying when they see it.

LaFleur then describes Bazelon's use of actual cases, and describes some of her research into the platforms where teens bully each other such as Facebook and Formspring, and the limited measures those platforms have in place to deal with bullying.

LaFleur concludes her review recapitulating Bazelon's key call to awareness for parents, "If you wouldn’t let your kids out at night alone, why would you give them unfettered access to every corner of the Internet?” and closes with her own contextualizing call to parents to understand that as their kids have "5,000 friends" on the internet, that what their kids really need to know is how to be a real friend.

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In researching her book "Sticks and Stones," Emily Bazelon was struck by how many of the adults she interviewed "could access, with riveting clarity, a memory of childhood bullying." Whether they had been victims, bullies or bystanders didn't seem to matter. "These early experiences of cruelty were transformative," she writes, "no matter which role you played in the memory reel."

Bullying isn't new. But our attempts to respond to it are, as Bazelon explains in her richly detailed, thought-provoking book. Scholarship on bullying has its roots in the 1970s, when Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus developed what became the gold standard for prevention programs in schools. Yet it wasn't until 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire on their Columbine classmates, that the United States began tackling the issue in a serious way.

Today, however, the challenge has been complicated by kids' access to new technologies, which have given rise to virtual tormentors, cyberbullies and "Facebook thugs." Whether or not the Internet has made bullying more frequent, it has made it more pernicious and pervasive. Malicious gossip that once was limited to the hallways or the bathroom walls now spreads like wildfire through "the constant connectivity of cell phones and laptops." Harsh words hastily exchanged online can hit harder than when delivered face to face. Kids can't get away from bullies who pop up on the screens in their bedrooms. Emotional violence in the virtual world can inflict real pain.

Young girls, who tend to be greater users of social media, are especially at risk. As Bazelon describes, when the Pew Research Center asked 12- and 13-year-old girls, "Have you had a bad experience online that made you nervous about going to school the next day?," more than 25 percent said yes. The vicious online exchanges reprinted in "Sticks and Stones" could turn this 21st-century mom into a Luddite. Combine that with the headline-grabbing tragedies of young bullying victims who turn to suicide, and parents of adolescents can be forgiven for obsessing about the tech-toting teen barbarians at the gate.

Yet "Sticks and Stones" is not intended to fuel parental hysteria. Rather than bemoan the bullying epidemic, Bazelon reassures us that none exists - or at least that the statistics haven't really changed since the 1970s. To deal effectively with bullying, she asserts, we should "choose the response that fits the facts, not our less rational fears."

True bullying is characterized by repeated acts of physical or verbal aggression in which a physically stronger or more popular child wields that power over a weaker one. Conflict among equals and random acts of meanness don't qualify. This doesn't mean that what kids call "drama" is pleasant to live through. But the vast majority of young people never get involved in the oppressive brutality of bullying, and broadcasting that fact could be helpful in combating the problem. As Bazelon points out, "When kids understand that concerted cruelty is the exception and not the rule, they respond: bullying drops, and students become more active about reporting it."

A law school graduate and journalist, Bazelon makes her case through the lens of three teenagers' experiences: a 13-year-old girl whose persecution began over a hairdo and escalated to the point that she changed schools; an eighth-grade boy who sued his school for failing to protect him against anti-gay harassment; and a female high school student who faced criminal charges in connection with the suicide of another teen who had been bullied before her death. Comprehensive in her reporting and balanced in her conclusions, Bazelon extracts from these stories useful lessons for young people, parents and principals alike.

Most enlightening and disturbing, however, is her discussion of social networking sites such as Formspring and Facebook. These platforms can be potent conduits for cruelty; a 2011 survey by the Pew Center found that 15 percent of teens "said they'd been harassed on a social networking site in the last twelve months." Twenty million kids are Facebook users, and as Bazelon persuasively argues, Facebook could easily devote more resources to tackling online bullying, helping schools to do the same and enforcing its own policies.

I was impressed, for example, by the influence Facebook holds over young users; 94 percent of Facebook users under 18 who posted objectionable content never caused a problem again after receiving just one official warning that "content they posted prompted an abuse report the site had investigated and confirmed." Yet Bazelon reports that the Facebook employees who review harassment complaints spend only a few seconds per case, and with 2 million abuse reports of all kinds pouring in every week, many seem to slip through the cracks. There's no hotline to get immediate relief from antisocial networking.

Bazelon concludes by urging parents to rethink the balance between how we let our kids spend their time and the way we supervise them: "If you wouldn't let your kids out at night alone, why would you give them unfettered access to every corner of the Internet?" In-person contact and communication are the cornerstones of healthy relationships. In an age where our kids can have 5,000 "friends," they need to learn what it really means to be one.
bookworld@washpost.com
Vinca LaFleur is a partner at West Wing Writers.

STICKS AND STONES

Defeating the Culture of Bullying

and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy

By Emily Bazelon

Random House. 386 pp. $27

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sticks and stones: defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering the power of character and empathy by emily bazelon

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'Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy' by Emily Bazelon

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In researching her book "Sticks and Stones," Emily Bazelon was struck by how many of the adults she interviewed "could access, with riveting clarity, a memory of childhood bullying." Whether they had been victims, bullies or bystanders didn't seem to matter.

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New York Times Book Review of Sticks and Stone, Review by: John Schwartz

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New York Times Book Review of Sticks and Stone, Review by: John Schwartz

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John Schwartz draws from Bazelon's personal history of being "fired" by her friends in 8th grade to emphasize the depth of the well of purpose from which she writes. Schwartz laundry-lists the intentions and potential achievements that Bazelon is going for with this book, which in sum would change the world in which we live from our laws to our media lives, to our cultural habits. Schwartz then provides a brief history of Bazelon's career which included covering the Phoebe Prince suicide for Slate over a series of articles, which evolved and broadened into the writing of Sticks and Stones. Through covering the Phoebe Prince story, Bazelon found that the factors leading up to Phoebe's suicide were much more complex than it became known and dealt with by the courts and by the press, and the messier story that Bazelon unearthed, calls into question the dire consequences for the students who were charged.

Schwartz honors Bazelon's for her "clear eyed compassion" in her storytelling for both victims and bullies, noting that she has an understanding of the law, and also an understanding of how teen bullies whose brains aren't fully developed could have their lives completely ruined by time in jail or on the front page news- her compassion drives her to paint the possibility of restoration for the perpetrators, given proper training and guidance.

Schwartz acknowledges her take on cyberbullying, that although it feels more ruthless because it is inescapable, and perpetrators can inflict their pain anonymously, it is the same old behavior, just in the new context of our times. Schwartz includes Bazelon's theme that most kids will get through it more resilient, but some won't make it through unharmed or at all, and so far, we're terrible and figuring out who will be fine, and who won't.

Schwartz includes a fair warning, that her stories will send the reader emotionally back to the school yard where if they experienced bullying, they will be reliving the torment through flashbacks.

Schwartz highlights Bazelon's prescriptions to stop bullying and provides the practical strategies she found in the review as implementable takeways for the reader.

Schwartz recommends this book for parents and educators, and calls for it to be taught in law and journalism schools.

In closing, this review calls back to Bazelon's own words, drawing parents and educators to keep striking the balance between policing kids and protecting them, because their growth, ability to solve problems, and resilience are at stake.

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"I don't like to flirt with anyone.

"I am just me

"LABELS ARE FOR CANS."

The abuse became physical, but Jacob and his family fought back in court with a suit that involved the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department. This forced some changes at the school; Jacob, however, graduated elsewhere.

These are not simple or satisfying stories, but Ms. Bazelon tells them with cleareyed compassion - even for the bullies. Ms. Bazelon notes that Supreme Court justices recognize that a teenager's frontal lobe, which manages impulsiveness and judgment, isn't fully developed yet, and so the court has prohibited the death penalty and even life without parole for many offenses committed by juveniles. Given time and guidance, bullies can outgrow their bad patterns of behavior, but their lives can be ruined if their awful teenage behavior puts them in the headlines or jail.

She gives appropriate attention to cyberbullying as well, not blaming the Internet for an impulse as old as the schoolyard but describing the amplified effects of online taunts, which can follow our children home and into their bedrooms, persist online and are out there for everyone to see, potentially going viral and spreading the humiliation to an audience of thousands or even millions. And she notes that some youngsters are more resilient than others, though we're not good at figuring out who will emerge from run-ins stronger and who will be seriously harmed.

Those of us whose kids have been bullied could find Ms. Bazelon's stories agonizing. Those of us who were picked on in school will find memories flashing back with the vividness of nightmares. In those days before bullying made national headlines getting knocked around was a part of growing up; the psychic toll went largely unnoticed. No state had laws on the books that "clearly addressed bullying," she writes, until the shootings at Columbine High School.

In its prescriptions "Sticks and Stones" shines. Yes, we need to give bullying "serious and sustained attention" as a first step toward preventing it and helping kids who are subjected to it. But it's also important not to overdiagnose and to try to distinguish the continuing grinding domination found in bullying from the occasional conflict that qualifies as mere drama or knuckleheadedness.

One way to do that, Ms. Bazelon argues, is to get the message to students that bullying isn't as common as they tend to think it is and to find ways to nourish the capacity for empathy that is present in almost everybody. Another is to teach members of the bystander majority that they have a responsibility to support victims and report confrontations.

These are not airy Kumbaya dreams, she explains, but tested methods that can produce results. That is why this authoritative and important book should not only be read by educators and parents alike, but should also be taught in law schools and journalism schools, should either survive.

Ultimately, Ms. Bazelon wisely warns us, we still have to try to let kids be kids. If we turn our schools into Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, where all is seen and little is allowed, "We risk raising kids who don't know how to solve problems on their own, withstand adversity or bounce back from the harsh trials life inevitably brings." And so, she says with a sigh: "It's a tricky balance to strike, the line between protecting kids and policing them. But we have to keep trying to find it."

STICKS AND STONES

By Emily Bazelon

386 pages. Random House. $27.

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sticks and stones: defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering the power of character and empathy (book)

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"I don't like to flirt with anyone. "I am just me "LABELS ARE FOR CANS." The abuse became physical, but Jacob and his family fought back in court with a suit that involved the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department. This forced some changes at the school; Jacob, however, graduated elsewhere.

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New York Times Book Review of Sticks and Stones, Review by: Andrew Solomon

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New York Times Book Review of Sticks and Stones, Review by: Andrew Solomon

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Andrew Solomon sets the stage for his review by contextualizing across history the question of humanity's trajectory towards greater cruelty or greater goodness. Solomon's philosophical and literary knowledge targets an educated reader, as he sets up dichotomies of good and evil across disciplines and world events. In his introduction, he generously gives a nod to another author, Steven Pinker, as he references his book, The Better Angels of our Nature to stand in as an argument that humanity is becoming more peaceful than ever before. He continues to contextualize online cruelty in a culture of media sponsored meanness where ethics aren't taught at home or school, and suggests that youthful cruelty remains in a constant quantity, no more of it than there has always been.

Solomon introduces Sticks and Stones with a complimentary and clear description of Bazelon's structure and methodology, including the names and micro summaries of the three main case studies. Solomon paints Bazelon as a compassionate narrator, compassionate to both the bullied and the bullies, looking for the deeper causes and humanity within each party. As she researches the "seeds of troubling behavior" in the contexts and home lives of the bullies, she investigates the work of Dan Olweus and George Sugai. She ends up in the offices of Facebook to see what they are doing about bullying, and experiences a bit of bullying from them as she criticizes their inadequate strategies.

Solomon criticizes the book for lacking a central thesis, and laments that although he is now better informed, he is not empowered by the book with knowledge of how to take action. He calls for Bazelon to put in more meta-analysis and directive authority into her book.

Solomon closes his critique in praise of her triumph for her compassionate and empathic take on all of the people and circumstances of her investigations. Solomon appreciates her human touch to the book and notes that her realness is better than objectivity for such a deeply emotional subject.

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The question of whether humans are becoming more brutal or more civilized has been debated urgently by the Athenians, the philosophers of the Renaissance, the Victorians and the existentialists. Those who argue that cruelty is currently becoming more acute point to the Rwandan genocide, global warming, and the malicious acts of selfish corporations and corrupt politicians. Contrariwise, others point to a safer and kinder society of greater prosperity and less prejudice against social, religious and ethnic minorities; Steven Pinker's 2011 book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," proposes that we live more peaceably now than ever before. The dichotomous argument has particular resonance in the context of childhood. Teachers no longer routinely hit students; laws require accommodations for young people with learning disabilities; parents keep watch for teachers' abuse and vice versa; developmental therapists are around every corner. Yet the Internet has unleashed meanness of a previously unimagined scope and celerity; broken households escalate children's proclivity to launch unmonitored assaults on weaker kids; ethics are preached neither at home nor at school; and the accessibility of assault rifles enables nearly apocalyptic juvenile excess. Adult bullies from talk radio to Congress get constant airtime, and in many quarters their belligerence is applauded. Still, we are shocked when children behave belligerently toward one another. Youthful aggression has always been a problem and always will be; the pitilessness of childhood, like that of the world, is most likely a constant quantity.

Emily Bazelon's intelligent, rigorous "Sticks and Stones" charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts, who was bullied atrociously and committed suicide. Bazelon includes chapters on anti-bullying measures with good track records. She reviews jurisprudence on bullying, and examines both the virtues and the pitfalls of treating it as a crime. She tries to delineate what parents can achieve, what schools can achieve, and what may come of the shifting power differential among parents and schools and social agencies.

Bazelon is at her best as a storyteller, and the most interesting parts of the book are its human narratives. She resists the idea that there is always an innocent victim; among her three subjects, she paints Monique as essentially blameless, but the others as having some hand in their own suffering. Her writing about Phoebe Prince for Slate, which inspired and is expanded in this book, is especially trenchant; it rejects the simple "bullied to death" narrative that dominated the media at the time. Bazelon indicates that Phoebe's situation was complicated: she had been cutting herself, had had problems in a previous school, had made a prior suicide attempt and had gone off her antidepressants six weeks before she took her life. Given Phoebe's history, Bazelon writes that she couldn't understand the prosecutor's decision "to lay the burden of her suicide at the feet of six adolescents."

If charity begins at home, then so, too, does brutality: at home and early, and Bazelon looks for the seeds of troubling behavior in the home lives of bullies. She is taken with the work of Dan Olweus, the grand old man of anti-bullying theory and practice, whose programs target the school, the classroom and the individual. She describes a headmaster who was able to transform the climate at his school largely through charisma, will and the methodology proposed by George Sugai, who believes that positive rewards given to students for positive social skills may be just as effective as punishment for those who are out of line. Investigating the role of the Internet in modern bullying, Bazelon visited the offices of Facebook, achieving an unusual degree of access. She describes both the company's woefully inadequate anti-bullying protocols for young subscribers - Facebook's current business model seems built on "habituating kids to giving up their privacy" - and their ill-advised efforts to bully her once they got a whiff of her criticisms. Bazelon explores the role of adults in the lives of kids who are bullied, and shows that often, parents and teachers who set out to help end up exacerbating the problem. She refuses the notion that the real reason for bullying is violent video games, rock music, parental neglect, social media or any other single cause. She thinks with nuance, making it clear that the problem is overdetermined and requires complex, subtle solutions.

Sometimes, that makes the book feel confused. "Sticks and Stones" lacks a central thesis; it describes a problem, reports on many proposed solutions and leaves it to readers to draw their own conclusions. As someone who was bullied as a child, I found myself wishing to avoid these familiar narratives, which stirred up nostalgic fear; as the father of young children, I devoured them with anticipatory terror. Yet even though I came away from this book far better informed, I was left with no particular sense of what to do. Bazelon often provides excessive detail about process: details of how she arrived at conclusions that are not particularly startling. There is little meta-thinking; the analysis has an atomized quality. In "The Bully Society," published a year ago, Jessie Klein argues persuasively that the preponderance of bullying stems from the escalating social imperative for boys and girls to conform to oppressive masculine stereotypes. Bazelon accurately avers that such generalizations are reductive. "We have to be smart and careful about the Web," she concludes. "The Internet won't do it for us. The best thing we can do is help kids learn to look out for themselves." But sometimes reductive answers can be arresting, and one longs for Bazelon to proclaim a bit more, not always to let common sense trump revelation.

Her most winning achievement is the kindness she demonstrates throughout the book. She is nonjudgmental in a generous rather than simply neutral way, and she culls as much pathos from the circumstances of bullies as from those of their victims. She identifies not only the sadism of abusive children, but also their sadness. She is a compassionate champion for justice in the domain of childhood's essential unfairness. In several touching instances, she recounts her retreat from journalistic neutrality. On a subway in Washington, she sees some teenagers berating an older man, and forces herself to intervene after she thinks: "Wait, I'm writing a book about bullying! Bystanders are supposed to speak up!" The intervention leads to her being attacked verbally, and generates feelings of intense embarrassment; she ends up wondering whether she should have just stayed out of it. Then she suddenly figures out why so many students keep their distance when they witness bullying. In another passage, she describes exploiting her personal connections to help Monique escape her bullies by switching schools - "figuring that there's nothing fair about who knows whom in life." It's not standard operating procedure, but it reflects an essential humanity that is more important in this book than pure objectivity would be.

STICKS AND STONES

By Emily Bazelon

386 pp. Random House. $27.

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sticks and stones: defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering the power of character and empathy (book)

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'Sticks and Stones,' Emily Bazelon's Book on Bullying

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The question of whether humans are becoming more brutal or more civilized has been debated urgently by the Athenians, the philosophers of the Renaissance, the Victorians and the existentialists. Those who argue that cruelty is currently becoming more acute point to the Rwandan genocide, global warming, and the malicious acts of selfish corporations and corrupt politicians.

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Author Emily Bazelon Talks About Cyberbullying

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Author Emily Bazelon Talks About Cyberbullying

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"The distancing online, actually makes it easier for kids to be upstanders."

"If it's mean, intervene."

Interesting curriculum she mentions: Common Sense Media's 'Digital Passport' and 'Second Step'

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Author Emily Bazelon talks about Cyberbullying

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Common Sense Media founder and CEO Jim Steyer, sat down with acclaimed author Emily Bazelon to talk about cyberbullying solutions and her new book "Sticks an...

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True to her stylistic form, Bazelon hooks her article real life stories of children dying because of the cruelty of other students, and launches from those real tragedies to advocate for a clean and clear understanding of the definition of bullying. The importance of having a universally accepted and understood definition, Bazelon asserts, would help give guidance to truly helpful programs and curricula that could stop bullying in its tracks. As it stands, even though Bazelon provides a definition of bullying agreed upon by psychologists: "Physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance." Even so, state laws are being put into place, yet each state is defining bullying differently. In the midst of the definition confusion, Bazelon suggests that people still have a hard time identifying bullying, and often over-label incidents that are not necessarily bullying. With rampant over-labeling, legitimate bullying fails to get addressed and corrected as it should be.

Bazelon suggests for teachers and adults to set the tone, help foster strong ties among the students, and for adults to take the lead in renorming the culture by polling kids and broadcasting the results that far fewer kids actually bully or feel bullied than they think. The reframing of bullying as the outlier empowers students to speak up and view bullying as uncool.

Bazelon contextualizes the national passion against bullying in the statistics that many of the other negative teen behaviors such as binge drinking, driving drunk, and teen pregnancy are much lower, which means that as a culture, we finally have time to deal with this problem that hid beneath the pile of seemingly intractable problems, until they weren't. So, now we have the luxury to deal with the age old problem that never seemed important enough to deal with until teens started killing themselves and others.

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The definition of bullying adopted by psychologists is physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance. In other words, it's about one person with more social status lording it over another person, over and over again, to make him miserable.

But when every bad thing that happens to children gets called bullying, we end up with misleading narratives that obscure other distinct forms of harm. In the case of Bailey, the district attorney has said he has found no evidence of bullying as he properly defines it: a history of intimidation over time. It's a tragedy if the evidence ends up showing that he died from head injuries caused by another child's punches, but it's a different kind of tragedy if that child was known for bullying, and that his parents and his school failed to stop him.

In the video Amanda Todd made before her death, her account of online seduction, stalking and blackmail cries out for condemnation and police investigation. Yet because she also reported conflicts with kids at her school, her death was mostly ascribed simply to bullying.

On the other extreme of the spectrum, overly broad legal definitions of bullying - for example, ones that leave out the factors of repetition or power imbalance - can lead parents to cry bully whenever their child has a conflict with another child.

Sorting through the accusations is a burden for schools, especially when state laws straitjacket their response to a bullying accusation, rather than allowing them to use their judgment and take account of context. And the "bully" label carries a stigma that's hard for a child to escape. It makes a child seem permanently heartless, rather than capable of feeling empathy, which almost all are.

Crying wolf about bullying isn't good for the children who play the victim, either. Those who hold onto that identity are less likely to recover from adversity. Bullying victims need sympathy; they also need help learning to be resilient.

One way to better identify real bullying is to listen to how teenagers themselves describe their interpersonal conflicts. Most teenagers can identify bullying, but they can also distinguish it from what they often call "drama," which, the researchers Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have shown, is an accurate and common name for the ordinary skirmishes that mark most children's lives. In fact, it's drama that's common, and bullying, properly defined, that's less so.

Understanding what bullying means to children is integral to the success of every smart bullying prevention effort, because it harnesses the power of the majority. One effective strategy is for schools to survey their own students about bullying, and then broadcast the results to students. When they see evidence of what most of them know intuitively - that bullying is outlier behavior - they're even less likely to engage in it.

It's also crucial for the adults in the school to set the tone. They have to understand what bullying is and what it's not, respond when they see a domineering child going after a victim, and foster the strong ties with students that make all the difference for children's sense of belonging and decisions about where to turn when they need help.

Adults can also often do more good by asking questions that push children to come up with their own strategies than by dictating solutions themselves. By many measures, teenagers today are faring better than they were a generation ago. The rates of teenage pregnancy, binge drinking and drunken driving are down. So is violent juvenile crime and even fighting on school property.

Those heartening developments help explain why bullying is holding our national attention: as a society, we have the wherewithal now to attend to a psychological harm that has long deeply affected kids, but which adults used to mostly ignore. Bullying is a problem we can and should address. But not if we're wrongly led to believe that it's everything and everywhere.

Correction: March 18, 2013

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The definition of bullying adopted by psychologists is physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance. In other words, it's about one person with more social status lording it over another person, over and over again, to make him miserable.

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This riveting investigation into the morally complex lives of Anonymous vigil antes and their online tactics to garner justice for victims of bullying is worthy of a motion picture screenplay. Bazelon follows the lives of three main Anonymous members: Katherine, Ash, & Elias, and their lives as "white knights" through their online organization called #OptAntiBully. This tightly knit group of hackers from all over the globe, collaborate to bully the bullies. Bazelon uncovers a rather sadistic and inconsistent logic in Ash, who will harass a woman online for doing something he disagrees with, yet he spends hours of his life advocating in his unique way for justice for teen girls who've been raped and further humiliated in the realm of social media.

Bazelon's investigation leads her through a teen girl's suicide, and another girl's attempted suicide, both precipitated by rape and a weak response by the justice system. As she reveals the explicit violations that each girl suffered, she parallels how the boys who perpetrated the original crimes have become prey for Anonymous, who ruthlessly dox the boys: a process of identity exposure that involves revealing their private identities and incriminating information. Bazelon describes how the hackers go for brutal and extensive online shaming and reputation annihilation as consequence for their crimes. As the stories unfold, the intimate online relationships of the #OptAntiBully members have a drama of their own, and Bazelon reports on their trouble, downfall, and disbanding that occurs over the course of her reporting.

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Are antibullying activists the saviors of the Internet - or just a different kind of curse?

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How to Stop the Bullies by Emily Bazelon

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How to Stop the Bullies by Emily Bazelon

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In this article, which appeared in the March 2013 edition of The Atlantic, Bazelon takes on the role of investigative reporter to explore the realities of cyberbullying. Bazelon follows a story out of Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown, CT, where "Drama Queen" the anonymous composer of the "Let's Start Drama" page has riled up her school into an imbroglio of gossip, cruel comparison voting pages where "she" pits girls against each other with polls that ask, "Who's Prettier?" or polls that instigate, "Which boy would win in a fight?" This poll actually precipitated the two boys getting into a a knock-down brawl. She follows the story to Facebook Headquarters, where she learns how difficult it can be to discern online bullying because it lacks context. She also helps facilitate the deleting of the "Let's Start Drama Page" by merely being over the shoulder of the Facebook employee in charge of monitoring such action. Bazelon further explores cyberbullying by following a case where two members of Anonymous get involved in avenging a 12 year old girl who was sexually harassed and threatened by high school boys in Abilene, TX. This incident set the precedent for OpAntiBully, a system of blasting a bully into stopping the cyberbullying behavior. Bazelon also interviews MIT Professor Henry Lieberman who is working with his team to create technological fixes for online bullying.

This article is consistent with Bazelon's style in Sticks and Stones, in that she explores real life incidents from several angles with an earnest desire for hope.

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The angst and ire of teenagers is finding new, sometimes dangerous expression online-precipitating threats, fights, and a scourge of harrassment that parents and schools feel powerless to stop. The inside story of how experts at Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and even members of the hacker collective Anonymous are hunting for solutions to an increasingly tricky problem.

Geoff McFetridge

In the annals of middle-school mischief, the Facebook page Let's Start Drama deserves an entry. The creator of the page-no one knew her name, but everyone was sure she was a girl-had a diabolical knack for sowing conflict among students at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown, Connecticut. "Drama Queen," as I came to think of her in the months I spent reporting at the school to write a book about bullying, knew exactly how to use the Internet to rile her audience. She hovered over them in cyberspace like a bad fairy, with the power to needle kids into ending friendships and starting feuds and fistfights.

In contrast with some other social networks, like Twitter, Facebook requires its users to sign up with their real names. Drama Queen easily got around this rule, however, by setting up Let's Start Drama with a specially created e-mail address that didn't reveal her identity. Wrapped in her cloak of anonymity, she was free to pass along cruel gossip without personal consequences. She started by posting a few idle rumors, and when that gained her followers, she asked them to send her private messages relaying more gossip, promising not to disclose the source. Which girl had just lost her virginity? Which boy had asked a girl to sext him a nude photo? As Drama Queen posted the tantalizing tidbits she gathered, more kids signed up to follow her exploits-a real-life version of Gossip Girl. She soon had an audience of 500, many drawn from Woodrow Wilson's 750 students, plus a smattering from the local high school and a nearby Catholic school.

Students didn't just message rumors to Drama Queen; they also commented in droves on her posts, from their own real Facebook accounts, or from other fake ones. As one kid wrote about Drama Queen on the Let's Start Drama page, "She just starts mad shit and most of the time so do the ppl who comment."

Drama Queen was particularly ingenious at pitting kids against each other in contests of her own creation. She regularly posted photographs of two girls side by side, with the caption "WHOS PRETTIERRR?!" Below the pictures, commenters would heckle and vote. One such contest drew 109 comments over three days. When it became clear which contestant was losing, that girl wrote that she didn't care: "nt even tryinqq to b funny or smart." The rival who beat her answered, "juss mad you losss ok ppl voted me ! If you really loooked better they wouldve said you but THEY DIDNT sooo sucks for you." This exchange nearly led to blows outside of school, other students told me. And they said a fight did break out between two boys who were featured on Let's Start Drama, in dueling photos, above the caption "Who would win in a fight?" They reportedly ended up pummeling each other off school grounds one day after classes.

Melissa Robinson, who was a social worker for the Middletown Youth Services Bureau, quickly got wind of Let's Start Drama because, she says, "it was causing tons of conflict." Robinson worked out of an office at Woodrow Wilson with Justin Carbonella, the bureau's director, trying to fill gaps in city services to help students stay out of trouble. Their connecting suite of small rooms served as a kind of oasis at the school: the two adults didn't work for the principal, so they could arbitrate conflict without the threat of official discipline. I often saw kids stop by just to talk, and they had a lot to say about the aggression on Let's Start Drama and the way it was spilling over into real life. "We'd go on Facebook to look at the page, and it was pretty egregious," Carbonella told me. Surfing around on Facebook, they found more anonymous voting pages, with names like Middletown Hos, Middletown Trash Talk, and Middletown Too Real. Let's Start Drama had the largest audience, but it had spawned about two dozen imitators.

Carbonella figured that all of these pages had to be breaking Facebook's rules, and he was right. The site has built its brand by holding users to a relatively high standard of decency. "You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user," Facebook requires people to pledge when they sign up. Users also agree not to fake their identities or to post content that is hateful or pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic violence. In other words, Facebook does not style itself as the public square, where people can say anything they want, short of libel or slander. It's much more like a mall, where private security guards can throw you out.

Carbonella followed Facebook's procedure for filing a report, clicking through the screens that allow you to complain to the site about content that you think violates a rule. He clicked the bubbles to report bullying and fake identity. And then he waited. And waited. "It felt like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean," Carbonella said. "There was no way to know if anyone was out there on the other end. For me, this wasn't a situation where I knew which student was involved and could easily give it to a school guidance counselor. It was completely anonymous, so we really needed Facebook to intervene." But, to Carbonella's frustration, Let's Start Drama stayed up. He filed another report. Like the first one, it seemed to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Facebook, of course, is the giant among social networks, with more than 1 billion users worldwide. In 2011, Consumer Reports published the results of a survey showing that 20 million users were American kids under the age of 18; in an update the next year, it estimated that 5.6 million were under 13, the eligible age for an account. As a 2011 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project put it, "Facebook dominates teen social media usage." Ninety-three percent of kids who use social-networking sites have a Facebook account. (Teens and preteens are also signing up in increasing numbers for Twitter-Pew found that 16 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds say they use the site, double the rate from two years earlier.)

Social networking has plenty of upside for kids: it allows them to pursue quirky interests and connect with people they'd have no way of finding otherwise. An online community can be a lifeline if, say, you're a gender-bending 15-year-old in rural Idaho or, for that matter, rural New York. But as Let's Start Drama illustrates, there's lots of ugliness, too. The 2011 Pew report found that 15 percent of social-media users between the ages of 12 and 17 said they'd been harassed online in the previous year. In 2012, Consumer Reports estimated that 800,000 minors on Facebook had been bullied or harassed in the previous year. (Facebook questions the methodology of the magazine's survey; however, the company declined to provide specifics.) In the early days of the Internet, the primary danger to kids seemed to be from predatory adults. But it turns out that the perils adults pose, although they can be devastating, are rare. The far more common problem kids face when they go online comes from other kids: the hum of low-grade hostility, punctuated by truly damaging explosions, that is called cyberbullying.

What can be done about this online cruelty and combat? As parents try, and sometimes fail, to keep track of their kids online, and turn to schools for help, youth advocates like Robinson and Carbonella have begun asking how much responsibility falls on social-networking sites to enforce their own rules against bullying and harassment. What does happen when you file a report with Facebook? And rather than asking the site to delete cruel posts or pages one by one, is there a better strategy, one that stops cyberbullying before it starts? Those questions led me to the Silicon Valley headquarters of Facebook, then to a lab at MIT, and finally (and improbably, I know) to the hacker group Anonymous.

The people at Facebook who decide how to wield the site's power when users complain about content belong to its User Operations teams. The summer after my trips to Woodrow Wilson, I traveled to the company's headquarters and found Dave Willner, the 27-year-old manager of content policy, waiting for me among a cluster of couches, ready to show me the Hate and Harassment Team in action. Its members, who favor sneakers and baseball caps, scroll through the never-ending stream of reports about bullying, harassment, and hate speech. (Other groups that handle reports include the Safety Team, which patrols for suicidal content, child exploitation, and underage users; and the Authenticity Team, which looks into complaints of fake accounts.) Willner was wearing flip-flops, and I liked his blunt, clipped way of speaking. "Bullying is hard," he told me. "It's slippery to define, and it's even harder when it's writing instead of speech. Tone of voice disappears." He gave me an example from a recent report complaining about a status update that said "He got her pregnant." Who was it about? What had the poster intended to communicate? Looking at the words on the screen, Willner had no way to tell.

In an attempt to impose order on a frustratingly subjective universe, User Operations has developed one rule of thumb: if you complain to Facebook that you are being harassed or bullied, the site takes your word for it. "If the content is about you, and you're not famous, we don't try to decide whether it's actually mean," Willner said. "We just take it down."

All other complaints, however, are treated as "third-party reports" that the teams have to do their best to referee. These include reports from parents saying their children are being bullied, or from advocates like Justin Carbonella.

To demonstrate how the harassment team members do their jobs, Willner introduced me to an affable young guy named Nick Sullivan, who had on his desk a sword-carrying Grim Reaper figurine. Sullivan opened the program that he uses for sorting and resolving reports, which is known as the Common Review Tool (a precursor to the tool had a better name: the Wall of Shame).

Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. "We optimize for half a second," he said. "Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time." (A Facebook spokesperson said later that the User Operations teams use a process optimized for accuracy, not speed.) That reminded me of Let's Start Drama. Six months after Carbonella sent his reports, the page was still up. I asked why. It hadn't been set up with the user's real name, so wasn't it clearly in violation of Facebook's rules?

After a quick search by Sullivan, the blurry photos I'd seen many times at the top of the Let's Start Drama page appeared on the screen. Sullivan scrolled through some recent "Who's hotter?" comparisons and clicked on the behind-the-scenes history of the page, which the Common Review Tool allowed him to call up. A window opened on the right side of the screen, showing that multiple reports had been made. Sullivan checked to see whether the reports had failed to indicate that Let's Start Drama was administered by a fake user profile. But that wasn't the problem: the bubbles had been clicked correctly. Yet next to this history was a note indicating that future reports about the content would be ignored.

We sat and stared at the screen.

Willner broke the silence. "Someone made a mistake," he said. "This profile should have been disabled." He leaned in and peered at the screen. "Actually, two different reps made the same mistake, two different times."

There was another long pause. Sullivan clicked on Let's Start Drama to delete it.

With millions of reports a week, most processed in seconds-and with 2.5 billion pieces of content posted daily-no wonder complaints like Carbonella's fall through the cracks. A Facebook spokesperson said that the site has been working on solutions to handle the volume of reports, while hiring "thousands of people" (though the company wouldn't discuss the specific roles of these employees) and building tools to address misbehavior in other ways.

One idea is to improve the reporting process for users who spot content they don't like. During my visit, I met with the engineer Arturo Bejar, who'd designed new flows, or sets of responses users get as they file a report. The idea behind this "social reporting" tool was to lay out a path for users to find help in the real world, encouraging them to reach out to people they know and trust-people who might understand the context of a negative post. "Our goal should be to help people solve the underlying problem in the offline world," Bejar said. "Sure, we can take content down and warn the bully, but probably the most important thing is for the target to get the support they need."

After my visit, Bejar started working with social scientists at Berkeley and Yale to further refine these response flows, giving kids new ways to assess and communicate their emotions. The researchers, who include Marc Brackett and Robin Stern of Yale, talked to focus groups of 13- and 14-year-olds and created scripted responses that first push kids to identify the type and intensity of the emotion they're feeling, and then offer follow-up remedies depending on their answers. In January, during a presentation on the latest version of this tool, Stern explained that some of those follow-ups simply encourage reaching out to the person posting the objectionable material-who typically takes down the posts or photos if asked.

Dave Willner told me that Facebook did not yet, however, have an algorithm that could determine at the outset whether a post was meant to harass and disturb-and could perhaps head it off. This is hard. As Willner pointed out, context is everything when it comes to bullying, and context is maddeningly tricky and subjective.

One man looking to create such a tool-one that catches troublesome material before it gets posted-is Henry Lieberman, a computer scientist whose background is in artificial intelligence. In November, I took a trip to Boston to meet him at his office in MIT's Media Lab. Lieberman looked like an older version of the Facebook employees: he was wearing sneakers and a baseball cap over longish gray curls. A couple years ago, a rash of news stories about bullying made him think back to his own misery in middle school, when he was a "fat kid with the nickname Hank the Tank." (This is hard to imagine now, given Lieberman's lean frame, but I took his word for it.) As a computer guy, he wondered whether cyberbullying would wreck social networking for teenagers in the way spam once threatened to kill e‑mail-through sheer overwhelming volume. He looked at the frustrating, sometimes fruitless process for logging complaints, and he could see why even tech-savvy adults like Carbonella would feel at a loss. He was also not impressed by the generic advice often doled out to young victims of cyberbullying. " 'Tell an adult. Don't let it get you down'-it's all too abstract and detached," he told me. "How could you intervene in a way that's more personal and specific, but on a large scale?"

To answer that question, Lieberman and his graduate students started analyzing thousands of YouTube comments on videos dealing with controversial topics, and about 1 million posts provided by the social-networking site Formspring that users or moderators had flagged for bullying. The MIT team's first insight was that bullies aren't particularly creative. Scrolling through the trove of insults, Lieberman and his students found that almost all of them fell under one (or more) of six categories: they were about appearance, intelligence, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or social acceptance and rejection. "People say there are an infinite number of ways to bully, but really, 95 percent of the posts were about those six topics," Lieberman told me.

NowThisNews visits MIT's Media Lab to interview Lieberman about his work.

Focusing accordingly, he and his graduate students built a "commonsense knowledge base" called BullySpace-essentially a repository of words and phrases that could be paired with an algorithm to comb through text and spot bullying situations. Yes, BullySpace can be used to recognize words like fat and slut (and all their text-speak misspellings), but also to determine when the use of common words varies from the norm in a way that suggests they're meant to wound.

Lieberman gave me an example of the potential ambiguity BullySpace could pick up on: "You ate six hamburgers!" On its own, hamburger doesn't flash cyberbullying-the word is neutral. "But the relationship between hamburger and six isn't neutral," Lieberman argued. BullySpace can parse that relationship. To an overweight kid, the message "You ate six hamburgers!" could easily be cruel. In other situations, it could be said with an admiring tone. BullySpace might be able to tell the difference based on context (perhaps by evaluating personal information that social-media users share) and could flag the comment for a human to look at.

BullySpace also relies on stereotypes. For example, to code for anti-gay taunts, Lieberman included in his knowledge base the fact that "Put on a wig and lipstick and be who you really are" is more likely to be an insult if directed at a boy. BullySpace understands that lipstick is more often used by girls; it also recognizes more than 200 other assertions based on stereotypes about gender and sexuality. Lieberman isn't endorsing the stereotypes, of course: he's harnessing them to make BullySpace smarter. Running data sets from the YouTube and Formspring posts through his algorithm, he found that BullySpace caught most of the insults flagged by human testers-about 80 percent. It missed the most indirect taunting, but from Lieberman's point of view, that's okay. At the moment, there's nothing effective in place on the major social networks that screens for bullying before it occurs; a program that flags four out of five abusive posts would be a major advance.

Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments-à la Let's Start Drama. "Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren't interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups," Lieberman told me. "For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads-you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source." Lieberman's dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids' names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic-meaning their behavior is as well.)

I know some principals and guidance counselors who would pay for this kind of information. The question is what to do with it. Lieberman doesn't believe in being heavy-handed. "With spam, okay, you write the program to just automatically delete it," he said. "But with bullying, we're talking about free speech. We don't want to censor kids, or ban them from a site."

More effective, Lieberman thinks, are what he calls "ladders of reflection" (a term he borrowed from the philosopher Donald Schön). Think about the kid who posted "Because he's a fag! ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing]!!!" What if, when he pushed the button to submit, a box popped up saying "Waiting 60 seconds to post," next to another box that read "I don't want to post" and offered a big X to click on? Or what if the message read "That sounds harsh! Are you sure you want to send that?" Or what if it simply reminded the poster that his comment was about to go to thousands of people?

Although Lieberman has had exploratory conversations about his idea with a few sites, none has yet deployed it. He has a separate project going with MTV, related to its Web and phone app called Over the Line?, which hosts user-submitted stories about questionable behavior, like sexting, and responses to those stories. Lieberman's lab designed an algorithm that sorts the stories and then helps posters find others like them. The idea is that the kids posting will take comfort in having company, and in reading responses to other people's similar struggles.

Lieberman would like to test how his algorithm could connect kids caught up in cyberbullying with guidance targeted to their particular situation. Instead of generic "tell an adult" advice, he'd like the victims of online pummeling to see alerts from social-networking sites designed like the keyword-specific ads Google sells on Gmail-except they would say things like "Wow! That sounds nasty! Click here for help." Clicking would take the victims to a page that's tailored to the problem they're having-the more specific, the better. For example, a girl who is being taunted for posting a suggestive photo (or for refusing to) could read a synthesis of the research on sexual harassment, so she could better understand what it is, and learn about strategies for stopping it. Or a site could direct a kid who is being harassed about his sexuality to resources for starting a Gay-Straight Alliance at his school, since research suggests those groups act as a buffer against bullying and intimidation based on gender and sexuality. With the right support, a site could even use Lieberman's program to offer kids the option of an IM chat with an adult. (Facebook already provides this kind of specific response when a suicidal post is reported. In those instances, the site sends an e-mail to the poster offering the chance to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or chat online with one of its experts.)

Lieberman would like to build this content and then determine its effectiveness by asking kids for their feedback. He isn't selling his algorithms or his services. As a university professor, he applies for grants, and then hopes companies like MTV will become sponsors. He's trying to work with companies rather than criticize them. "I don't think they're trying to reflexively avoid responsibility," he told me. "They are conscious of the scale. Anything that involves individual action on their part, multiplied by the number of complaints they get, just isn't feasible for them. And it is a challenging problem. That's where technology could help a little bit. My position is that technology can't solve bullying. This is a people problem. But technology can make a difference, either for the negative or the positive. And we're behind in paying attention to how to make the social-network universe a better place, from a technological standpoint."

Internal findings at Facebook suggest that Lieberman's light touch could indeed do some good. During my visit to Silicon Valley, I learned that the site had moved from wholesale banishment of rule-breakers toward a calibrated combination of warnings and "temporary crippling of the user experience," as one employee put it. After all, if you're banished, you can sign up again with a newly created e-mail address under an assumed name. And you might just get angry rather than absorb the message of deterrence. Instead, Facebook is experimenting with threats and temporary punishments. For example, the Hate and Harassment Team can punish a user for setting up a group to encourage bullying, by barring that person from setting up any other group pages for a month or two. (If the account associated with the offensive group uses a made-up name, then the site's only leverage is to remove the group.) According to an in-house study, 94 percent of users whose content prompted a report had never been reported to the site before. As Dave Willner, the content-policy manager, put it when he told me about the study: "The rate of recidivism is very low."

He explained, in his appealingly blunt way, "What we have over you is that your Facebook profile is of value to you. It's a hostage situation." This didn't surprise me. In the course of my reporting, I'd been asking middle-school and high-school students whether they'd rather be suspended from school or from Facebook, and most of them picked school.

The hacker group Anonymous isn't the first place most parents would want their bullied kids to turn. Launched a decade ago, Anonymous is best known for its vigilante opposition to Internet censorship. The group has defaced or shut down the Web sites of the Syrian Ministry of Defense, the Vatican, the FBI, and the CIA. Its slogan, to the extent a loosely affiliated bunch of hackers with no official leadership can be said to have one, is "When your government shuts down the Internet, shut down your government." Anonymous has also wreaked financial havoc by attacking MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal after they froze payments to the accounts of WikiLeaks, the site started by Julian Assange to publish government secrets.

Since Anonymous is anarchic, the people who answer its call (and use its trademark Guy Fawkes mask in their online photos) speak for themselves rather than represent the group, and protest in all kinds of ways. Some, reportedly, have not been kind to kids. There was the case, for example, of a 15-year-old named McKay Hatch, who started a No Cussing Club in South Pasadena, California. When the concept took off in other cities, a group referring to itself as Anonymous launched a countercampaign, No Cussing Sucks, and posted Hatch's name, photo, and contact information across the Web; he got 22,000 e‑mails over two weeks.

But other people in Anonymous have a Robin Hood bent, and this fall, they rode to the rescue of a 12-year-old girl who'd come in for a torrent of hate on Twitter. Her error was to follow the feed of a 17-year-old boy she didn't know and then stop following him when he posted remarks she found rude. The boy took offense and, with three friends, went after her. The boys threatened to "gang bang" her, and one even told her to kill herself. "I'm gonna take today's anger and channel it into talking shit to this 12 year old girl," one wrote. "Blow up [her Twitter handle] till she deletes her twitter," another one added. The girl lived far from the boys, so she wasn't in physical danger, but she was disturbed enough to seek help online. "I have been told to kill myself alot its scary to think people in the world want you to die :( ," she wrote to another Twitter user who asked me to call her Katherine. "He has deleted some of them he was saying things like do you have a rope? and didnt the bleach work?"

Her pleas reached Katherine in the wake of the suicide of a 15-year-old Canadian girl named Amanda Todd. Before Amanda died, she posted a video of herself on YouTube, in which she silently told her story using note cards she'd written on. Amanda said that a man she'd met online had persuaded her to send him a topless photo, then stalked her and released the photo, causing her misery at school. The video is raw and disturbing, and it moved Katherine and a member of Anonymous with the screen name Ash. "It made me choke up," Ash told me. When Katherine discovered that people were still sending the compromising photo of Amanda around online, she and Ash teamed up to help organize a drive to stop them and report offending users to Twitter, which removes pornographic content appearing on its site.

As Katherine and Ash came across other examples of bullying, like rape jokes and suicide taunts, they found that "Twitter will suspend accounts even if they are not in violation of Twitter rules when simply 1000s of people mass report an account as spam," Katherine explained to me in an e‑mail. A Twitter spokesperson said this was possible (though he added that if spam reports turn out to be false, most accounts soon go back online). Twitter bans direct and specific threats, and it can block IP addresses to prevent users whose accounts are deleted from easily starting new ones. But the site doesn't have an explicit rule against harassment and intimidation like Facebook does.

While monitoring Twitter for other bullying, Katherine found the 12-year-old girl. When Katherine told Ash, he uncovered the boys' real names and figured out that they were high-schoolers in Abilene, Texas. Then he pieced together screenshots of their nasty tweets, along with their names and information about the schools they attended, and released it all in a public outing (called a "dox"). "I am sick of seeing people who think they can get away with breaking someone's confidence and planting seeds of self-hate into someone's head," he wrote to them in the dox. "What gives you the fucking right to attack someone to such a breaking point? If you are vile enough to do so and stupid enough to do so on a public forum, such as a social website, then you should know this ... We will find you and we will highlight your despicable behaviour for all to see."

"I informed them that the damage had been done and there was no going back," he explained to me. "They understood this to be an act by Anonymous when they were then messaged in the hundreds." At first the boys railed against Ash on Twitter, and one played down his involvement, denying that he had ever threatened to rape the girl. But after a while, two of the boys began sending remorseful messages. "For two solid days, every time we logged on, we had another apology from them," Ash said. "You hear a lot of lies and fake apologies, and these guys seemed quite sincere." Katherine thought the boys hadn't understood what impact their tweets would have on the girl receiving them-they hadn't thought of her as a real person. "They were actually shocked," she said. "I'm sure they didn't mean to actually rape a little girl. But she was scared. When they started to understand that, we started talking to them about anti-bullying initiatives they could bring to their schools."

I tried contacting the four boys to ask what they made of their encounter with Anonymous, and I heard back from one of them. He said that at first, he thought the girl's account was fake; then he assumed she wasn't upset, because she didn't block the messages he and the other boys were sending. Then Ash stepped in. "When i found out she was hurt by it i had felt horrible," wrote to me in an e‑mail. "I honestly don't want to put anyone down. i just like to laugh and it was horrible to know just how hurt she was." He also wrote, "It was shocking to see how big [Anonymous was] and what they do."

Ash also e-mailed his catalog of the boys' tweets to their principals and superintendents. I called the school officials and reached Joey Light, the superintendent for one of the districts in Abilene. He said that when Anonymous contacted him, "to be truthful, I didn't know what it was. At first the whole thing seemed sketchy." Along with the e-mails from Ash, Light got an anonymous phone call from a local number urging him to take action against the boys. Light turned over the materials Ash had gathered to the police officer stationed at the district's high school, who established that one of the boys had been a student there.

The officer investigated, and determined that the boy hadn't done anything to cause problems at school. That meant Light couldn't punish him, he said. "I realize bullying takes a lot of forms, but our student couldn't have harmed this girl physically in any way," he continued. "If you can't show a disruption at school, the courts tell us, that's none of our business." Still, Light told me he that he felt appreciative of Anonymous for intervening. "I don't have the technical expertise or the time to keep track of every kid on Facebook or Twitter or whatever," the superintendent said. "It was unusual, sure, but we would have never done anything if they hadn't notified us."

I talked with Ash and Katherine over Skype about a week after their Texas operation. I wanted to know how they'd conceived of the action they'd taken. Were they dispensing rough justice to one batch of heartless kids? Or were they trying to address cyberbullying more broadly, and if so, how?

Ash and Katherine said they'd seen lots of abuse of teenagers on social-networking sites, and most of the time, no adult seemed to know about it or intervene. They didn't blame the kids' parents for being clueless, but once they spotted danger, as they thought they had in this case, they couldn't bear to just stand by. "It sounds harsh to say we're teaching people a lesson, but they need to realize there are consequences for their actions," Ash said.

He and Katherine don't have professional experience working with teenagers, and I'm sure there are educators and parents who'd see them as suspect rather than helpful. But reading through the hate-filled tweets, I couldn't help thinking that justice Anonymous-style is better than no justice at all. In their own way, Ash and Katherine were stepping into the same breach that Henry Lieberman is trying to fill. And while sites like Facebook and Twitter are still working out ways to address harassment comprehensively, I find myself agreeing with Ash that "someone needs to teach these kids to be mindful, and anyone doing that is a good thing."

For Ash and Katherine, this has been the beginning of #OpAntiBully, an operation that has a Twitter account providing resource lists and links to abuse-report forms. Depending on the case, Ash says, between 50 and 1,000 people-some of whom are part of Anonymous and some of whom are outside recruits-can come together to report an abusive user, or bombard him with angry tweets, or offer support to a target. "It's much more refined now," he told me over e‑mail. "Certain people know the targets, and everyone contacts each other via DMs [direct messages]."

In a better online world, it wouldn't be up to Anonymous hackers to swoop in on behalf of vulnerable teenagers. But social networks still present tricky terrain for young people, with traps that other kids spring for them. My own view is that, as parents, we should demand more from these sites, by holding them accountable for enforcing their own rules. After all, collectively, we have consumer power here-along with our kids, we're the site's customers. And as Henry Lieberman's work at MIT demonstrates, it is feasible to take stronger action against cyberbullying. If Facebook and Twitter don't like his solution, surely they have the resources to come up with a few more of their own.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and a Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School.

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The angst and ire of teenagers is finding new, sometimes dangerous expression online-precipitating threats, fights, and a scourge of harrassment that parents and schools feel powerless to stop. The inside story of how experts at Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and even members of the hacker collective Anonymous are hunting for solutions to an increasingly tricky problem.