Cyberbullying rampant, say 83 percent of NY students polled

As Albany legislators prepare to pass the state's first cyberbullying law, a local legislator on Wednesday released results of a survey of about 10,000 New York students who say that cyberbullying occurs often and should be outlawed.

The online survey, released by State Sen. Jeffrey Klein (D-Bronx, Westchester), polled third- to 12th-grade students from 350 schools in 45 New York counties, and found that:

• Almost half of students know someone who is being cyberbullied.

• More than three quarters said cyberbullying happens all the time (58 percent) or often (25 percent).

• Only 1 in 5 students who had been bullied told someone about it.

• Students were most likely to tell their parents, followed by their teacher or school.

• About 70 percent said cyberbullying should be made illegal.

"I want them to know that the punishment does not fit the crime," one fifth-grader wrote in the survey when asked what adults should know about cyberbullying. "Giving a student detention does nothing but get them more mad. They in turn tell their friend and now they turn against you [the victim] . . . This is where thoughts of killing themselves comes into play."

Klein said he was spurred to conduct the survey by the 2011 suicide of 14-year-old Jaimey Rodemey, the Buffalo-area student who killed himself after what his parents called unrelenting cyber harassment, as well as by stories from parents and students in his district. When he set out to research how he could help address cyberbullying, he was shocked to find that there was little data available.

The survey "is the first real comprehensive effort to get insight into how kids are dealing with cyberbullying," said Klein spokesman Eric Soufer.

Klein, who developed the poll with attorney Parry Aftab, an anti-cyberbullying expert, is sponsoring one of several bills under consideration by the State Legislature on this type of harassment. His bill, which is backed by the Independent Democratic Conference, would alter certain existing harassment, stalking and impersonation criminal charges to add electronic communications, making cyberbullying a Class A misdemeanor punishable with up to one year in jail.

Other bills under consideration in Albany stress prevention and awareness education in schools.

On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported that a deal is imminent in Albany on a law that would define cyberbullying for the first time, making it easier for schools to set policies and authorities to enforce laws to prevent online harassment.

It's unclear whether any of the proposed bills, including Klein's, will end up in the cyberbullying legislation deal to be hashed out in Albany.

For his part, Klein believes the state needs to send a message to students by creating consequences.

"More education is good, but you need to make it a crime as well, otherwise we're not giving the community the tools to discourage this type of behavior," Soufer said Wednesday.

There are no laws in New York under which cyberbullying is specifically deemed a crime. And school districts have struggled with how to handle cyberbullying incidents, which generally occur off campus.

The existing laws were written before the Internet age and have loopholes, making it more difficult to prosecute cyberbullying cases, said Rockland County District Attorney Thomas Zugibe. He said he supports a stronger role for law-enforcement and denoting electronic communications as a medium for harassment and stalking.

"We want this to stop, and we want to put the message out there that, if you do it, there are consequences," Zugibe said.