News reflection by Yeung Ting, Gladys

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12162063

This news is extracted from BBC news and posted on Jan 2011. The title is “Teachers’ union warns of dangers of online abuse”. This news is talking about the teachers in U.K. were cyberbullied by parents. A union, The National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) pointed out that they have received a lot of calls from teachers who believed that they are bullied by the parents on the internet. As per the news, parents like to use facebook as a medium to express their dissatisfactory about the teachers. Most of the parents think that they have no choice as their concerns are not being listened. This is the only way for them to complaint and criticizes the teachers or the school’s leadership. However, for the teachers, they think the action of parents is a kind of defamation. There are 30% of teachers said that it had reduced their confidence and self-esteem.

After reading this news, a question pops up in my mind that is it really a cyberbullying? Cyberstalking means using the internet or other electronic tools to stalk or harass one or more victims. From that case, the parents use the internet as a tool to deliver their concerns. They hope their appeal or complaint can be listened or noticed by the school. I think they are not going to annoy someone on purpose. Parents have a right to express their view or opinion. However, if parents comment the teachers or leadership unreasonably and too often, then we may treat this kind of action as cyberbullying or cyberstalking. As mention in the news, some teachers feel annoying when parents keep commenting them on internet. The teacher union suggests that teachers should ask for help if they face this harassment.

In my view point, cyberstalking is hard to control in the internet world. Suppose everyone has the right and freedom to state their opinion on the internet. People have equal ability and enjoy equal interaction on internet. It seems that there is no way to avoid cyberstalking and I think cyberstalking happen in all around the world, not just in UK. Take an example; it is not difficult to find cyberstalking in some Hong Kong’s forums. Everyone starts to concern about this issue and it becomes a hot topic among the public.

To conclude, some people use internet as a medium to offence others and do not care about those victims. I think it is a kind a mental bullying to the victims. It is a kind of ethical problem. Unfortunately, cyberstaking is not easy to control or to be censored on the internet, we do nothing to avoid it at this stage.