Key US court decision on bullying & school

This may be a big step forward in US anti-bullying efforts: A recent federal court decision in Michigan sent "a clear message to schools that inaction, or even a simple unwise reaction, is not enough when it comes to dealing with bullies," author and cyberbullying researcher Justin Patchin blogs. The court ordered a Michigan school district to pay $800,000 "to a student who claimed the school did not do enough to protect him from years of bullying," according to the Detroit Free Press. The verdict "puts districts on notice that it's not enough to stop a student from bullying another." Dane Patterson, the victim in the Michigan case, "was in middle school when the bullying began as simple name calling and verbal harassment. It escalated in high school and included being pushed into lockers and at least one incident in 10th grade where he was sexually harassed," Patchin relates. It's not that his school didn't do anything at all about this, it just didn't change a thing. The occasional disciplinary action accomplished nothing, apparently. Patchin cites court records saying that, at one point, a teacher even joined the bullying by asking Dane in front of an entire class how it felt to be hit by a girl. "This is almost unbelievable," Patchin writes. I agree. He goes on to write about what does help, and I've written about it too (see this, but I have to be repetitive because this is so relevant, here: "Because a bully's success depends heavily on context, attempts to prevent bullying should concentrate primarily on changing the context rather than directly addressing the victim's or the bully's behavior," wrote Yale University psychologist Alan Yazdin in Slate.

COPPA 2.0 isn't kids' privacy 2.0

Remember COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998? It was designed to protect the privacy of children under 13. According to Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer, who just completed a paper for policymakers on current efforts to change COPPA, "the law was intended primarily to 'enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities' as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children." What's happening is, lawmakers in five or six states are considering extending COPPA's requirement for obtaining verifiable consent from parents of under-13s to parents of all minors, as Thierer explained in an audio interview at CNET with ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid. There are significant potential problems with that, Thierer suggests, not least of which is that a law intended to protect children's privacy could, with such revision, actually put it at greater risk. Under-13s and people 13-17 are very different developmentally, so there is also the important question of whether it's appropriate or even constitutionally sound to require verifiable parental consent from everyone up to the age of 18 to be allowed to register in any site with social-networking functionality? Do check out the CNET interview for more on this.

Digital body art

A great metaphor for the Net effect on digital natives' lives is used by the University of British Columbia, which has a whole Web site about the "digital tattoo," with a tutorial on how to "Protect," "Connect," "Learn," and "Work" with the Net effect. Here's how UBC explains it: "Just like a tattoo, your digital reputation is an expression of yourself. It's highly visible, and hard to remove. Explore how your online identity affects you, your friends, your school and your job - for better and for worse - and how to make informed choices." I found out about this resource in a Toronto Globe & Mail article, "Chances are your kids are savvier online than you think."

US's 2 new anti-predator laws

President Bush just signed two bills into law. The first one is useful for tracking sex offenders already convicted and registered, the second seems to be more about finding predators to be arrested and prosecuted. The "Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008" ("KIDS Act" for short) requires registered sex offenders to register online identifiers - email addresses, screennames, etc. - as well as address and phone numbers. "The US attorney general will make that information available on a database where approved Web sites can cross-check their users' information and weed out any potential predators," Newsday cites Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who introduced the original legislation, as saying. Offenders who don't provide all Internet identifiers "face the same penalty as those who fail to register their home address - up to 10 years in prison." The second law Bush signed, the "PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008," "requires the Department of Justice to create and implement a national strategy, as well as a new task force, for tracking down predators on the Web and prosecuting them," a PC World blog reports.

Real help for exploited kids

This is about thoughtful, helpful legislation that, according to the New York Times's editors, offers "a blueprint that federal lawmakers would do well to follow." New York's governor, David Paterson, just passed the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, which presumes "young children arrested for prostitution are victims of sexual exploitation." These are children likely to have fallen into prostitution "after being driven from their homes by abusive or neglectful parents." Those born in New York will be given the kind of protection that US federal law has long given exploited children who come from foreign countries and now needs to provide for those born on US soil. Under New York's new law, "sexually exploited children will be placed under state protection and sent to safe houses for services that are usually unavailable in detention, including counseling and medical help." The law doesn't go into effect until 2010 while the services it calls for are being set up.

US's high court on virtual child porn

The Supreme Court has upheld criminal penalties for promoting, or pandering, child pornography, the Associated Press reports. "The court upheld part of a 2003 law that also prohibits possession of child porn.... The law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child porn. It does not require that someone actually possess child pornography" and it replaced an earlier law that - according to Fox TV law columnist Lis Wiehl - required prosecutors to prove that the images were of "real" children, not digitally altered or morphed images, when "the 'real' children (aka victims) involved in child porn are almost impossible to find, let alone produce as witnesses at trial." In related news, New York State Attorney General announced that major US Internet service providers would block sources of child porn, the Washington Post reports, but the announcement created confusion as the ISPs later clarified that they weren't blocking anything (when free-speech advocates spoke out) - just "enforcing their own longstanding terms of service by agreeing not to host sites and newsgroups known to contain child porn," reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in his column on this at the San Jose Mercury News. Meanwhile, France "is joining at least five other countries where Internet service providers block access to child pornography," the Associated Press reports.

Supreme Court upholds PROTECT Act

In a 7 to 2 vote, the US Supreme Court upheld "an expansive federal law that punishes people who peddle or seek child pornography, saying Congress's remedy for a growing problem on the Internet does not violate free-speech guarantees," the Washington Post reports. "PROTECT" stands for Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today, and the law not only makes the exchange of child-abuse images illegal but also "any attempt to convince another person that child pornography is available," the Post adds, so it even covers solicitations that don't contain images. Even though critics say the law is "overly broad," this is really good. See why in the Post article or coverage at the New York Times.