Beyond Any Law

This Tuesday, lawyer Julie Fay gave a speech at Assembly on cyberbullying, and its impact on campuses. She spoke about the importance of the image that one puts forth on all types of social media and emphasized the negative impact social media can have when it comes to college applications, future employers and reputation in all spheres of living. She touched on, but did not delve very deep into, the issue of abuse of apps like YikYak and Streetchat, which allow users to speak freely under the shield of anonymity. Exeter has not been protected by the "Exeter bubble" in this case. Many students at the school this past spring read comments other users posted about them, more often degrading and negative than not. Within a small window of time, Yik Yak had turned into nothing more than an anonymous chat room for cyberbullying. People at Exeter posted hateful comments about their fellow classmates, using anonymity to bully students with no easily traceable source. Use of the app was discouraged (even more so upon returning to campus this term), but its impact did not go away when YikYak was deleted, nor was it softened after Tuesday’s assembly.Fay’s Assembly felt like it fell short of the goal to open up a helpful dialogue about cyberbullying and all of the chaos that ensued last spring. Instead, we merely scratched the surface of some legal semantics and talked about all of the warnings and precautions that our parents have been telling us since our first exposure to the internet. Fay stressed the importance of making sure that our reputations remained intact. This comment, however, seemed to tell students that they should not bully others because it will put their academic careers at risk, instead of telling them that they should not bully others because it is inherently wrong and cruel. This reasoning is what led students to post hateful comments not on Facebook, where the status is posted under their names, but on media like YikYak, where information is much harder to trace back to the source. The problem needed to be outright stated at assembly: the worst part about the bullying is that students are attacking one another, not that students are having their lives ruined because they bullied other people. If Fay had talked about this, a much different discussion might have ensued.Fay also seemed to stress the legal implications of cyberbullying as a scare tactic, but the simple fact is that laws are not the important part of cyberbullying; the main impact of bullying is on the victim. Fay could have had a more moving and productive talk if she had tried to create an environment of empathy in going over the effects of bullying on the victim, not on the bully. The tragic fact is that more than half of adolescent suicides are linked to cyberbullying and that victims of any kind of bullying are from two to nine times more likely to attempt suicide compared to non-victims. While it is not always the cause of such events, it is a factor that can be, and should be, controlled by the community. In truth, it was not the anonymous users on YikYak who suffered the consequences of their comments, but it was the targets. The Exeter community lost a valuable member, and a young girl with a promising future lost her life, but the perpetrators of such hate lost nothing. We might not be able to draw direct lines between cyberbullying and the loss of a person, but we also cannot deny that the anonymous cruelty caused suffering.In addition to this Assembly and the discussions that happened on Wednesday, where were these dialogues last year when these events actually occurred? Other than a single email, the administration didn’t seem to acknowledge what was going on. Exeter parents received an email in the middle of the summer regarding what was happening on Yik Yak, but none of the necessary discussions have been started until now—until tensions have died, until faults have been forgotten, until the impact of events of last spring have been lost on new students who were not there to experience them.Everybody already knows that cyberbullying is an issue. When it happened on campus, we didn’t address it. Bringing in a lawyer to talk about how cyberbullying impacts the reputation of the bully also has not addressed the problem. The problem is how we treat each other and how we feel we should treat each other, whether attached or detached from an identity. This is not a problem that can be solved overnight by an Assembly. This is a problem that originates from within the community itself. ​