KEY POINTS:
Hateful text messages, abusive emails and cyber-gossip are giving bullies new power over their victims, even in the supposed safety of their own homes, say researchers.
Most of the victims are themselves new, with two-thirds of children who report such harassment saying they had not been bullied before in other ways.
The researchers say schools and parents must work together to find ways to stop such behaviour, without robbing children and teens of valuable internet access.
"Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty," Kirk Williams and Nancy Guerra of the University of California at Riverside wrote in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Reports show a 50 per cent increase in the number of children aged 10 to 17 who said they were harassed online - from 6 per cent in 2000 to 9 per cent in 2005.
"Youth harassed online were significantly more likely to also report two or more detentions or suspensions, and skipping school, in the previous year," Michele Ybarra and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University said in another study. Those who said they had been harassed were eight times more likely than others to have carried a weapon to school.
Researchers found that 64 per cent of those who reported having been bullied online were not victims of physical or verbal aggression in person - making a whole new population of victims. An extreme example occurred last year when Megan Meier, 13, hanged herself after receiving vitriolic internet messages from someone posing as a teenage boy. Her Missouri town passed a bylaw making online harassment illegal.
"The anonymity provided by new technology limits a victim from responding in a way that may ordinarily stop a peer's aggressive behaviour or influence the probability of future acts, which provides an advantage to the perpetrator," said researcher Marci Feldman Hertz.
"The primary recommendation we have for parents is to talk to their kids. Talk to them about where they go on the internet, appropriate standards of behaviour."
Schools should add cyber-bullying to any policies they might already have on bullying and other forms of aggression, Ms Hertz said.
Some schools in Florida, South Carolina, Utah and Oregon are formulating policies to deal with cyber-bullying.
Total bans on using the internet or text-messaging are unlikely to work, Ms Hertz said. "Technology has a lot of benefits for young people - they can make social connections that they otherwise might not have the opportunity to make."
Patricia Agatston and colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina interviewed 148 teens and found they often did not tell their parents about bullying for fear of losing online privileges.
TARGETS
* 6 per cent of youngsters in 2000 aged 10 to 17 told US researchers they had been harassed online.
* 9 per cent in 2005 told of harassment.
- Reuters
