Should Kids Have the Right to Be Mean and Cruel Online?

I am disappointed that schools are not taking a hard line against cyber bullying. If someone appeals a decision and a judge agrees with them, you fight back and take it to a higher court. If these schools continue to be a pushover, not only will our kids never learn the schools themselves will never be respected for the institutions that they are. These schools are absolutely out of control, if they don't want kids to be doing something then they should be able to prevent them from doing it!

Now if some kid is cruel and mean to someone off the school grounds on their own time that is their business, that is when the constitutional rights come in. You have to wonder, in a society when people are more than happy to have their right to text behind the wheel of the automobile taken away from them (which I happen to agree with), fight for the right to be able to be mean and cruel to some other kid who may be emotionally unstable. We see it as a text or a post in a blog and something harmless, but to them it could be the end of the world. Ladies and gentleman, lets look at this from the perspective of what is best for the educational atmosphere in general not what is best for your own child, because you agree with cyber bullying and wish you would have had the technology to do it when you were a kid.

Clearly, the taunting and social awkwardness that we easily walked away from is enough to entrap these children and have them feeling as though the walls are caving in on them. The parents of the child who fought this in court probably felt vindicated because they themselves do not see what the big deal is as they would not have responded to such public humiliation in the same way. Courts are not firm on this issue; the woman who initially had charges filled against her for illegally accessing a computer and driving Megan Meier to the point of suicide had her case overturned.

However the three misdemeanors she had initially received was not much, though the fact that she was even involved in this whole thing speaks volumes about the attitudes of parents with respect to what their children are doing on-line. Why would a parent get involved in such a thing to begin with? Perhaps the comments of one of the aforementioned articles I am referencing puts it perfectly; when someone feels the need to do the taunting behind the computer screen it is the equivalent of the slander that used to occur in restrooms; it is a cowardly act at best. However "cowardly acts" are not being perceived as such, or taken as they should be by the kids the slander is being directed towards; with a grain of salt, no instead children are taking it personally. This is the reason why we should have laws on the books for cyber bullying, and why we should not leave today's children, who are already emotionally underdeveloped and clearly, psychologically, unprepared to their own devices. Adults created these social networking tools; adults should regulate them.