School counselor: "If you can hold the conversation with kids being respectful, to possess empathy, to celebrate everyone’s diversity ... it doesn’t matter what media comes because you will see another next month."
Most parents likely have not been aware of Ask.fm, the Latvia-based online community website which allows individuals to post anonymous questions and comments on a user's profile.
But the website, that is more popular among teens from the U.S. and Utah, has been associated with suicides prompted by cyber-bullying, including the Sept. 10 death of a 12-year-old Florida girl who leapt from a platform after reportedly being bullied for over a year with a band of older students.
Suicide is often a leading cause of death among Utah teens, but no cases from the state are actually from the website. A sampling of school district representatives contacted with the Deseret News said that while cyberbullying can be an ongoing issue, there was clearly few, if any, reports meant to school officials specifically about Ask.fm.
Students know about it and so are with it. It turned out one of many reasons a Roosevelt secondary school football coach suspended his entire team the 2009 week, demanding better behavior on the teens directly plus cyberspace.
Is it doesn't website's liberal anonymity and privacy policy pages that make it stand out in a ever-growing directory social network options, and already Utah students have realized themselves the victim of heinous cyberbullying attacks on Ask.fm.
"They’ve informed me to kill myself a couple of times," said a Utah 16-year-old, who spoke on condition her name not shared. "The messages on Ask.fm are likely once or twice weekly, but the bullying itself goes on every single day."
The teen said she gets been bullied by a gang of girls at her school for more than a year: face-to-face, via text and through websites like Facebook and Twitter. When she created her Ask.fm profile in the beginning with the summer, she said the harassment began almost immediately.
As well as encouraging her to kill herself, she said the messages have informed her that no one likes her at college, which everybody could be happier if she was dead and this her boyfriend deserves someone better.
She said she's often asked why she doesn't just delete her social networking profiles. But she said hello ought to be those that harass her who're punished and removed from sites.
"It’s not my fault that people don’t discover how to treat many people and that i don’t think I should should be normally the one who gives it up," she said.
Personality changes
The girl's mother said there has been a noticeable alter in her daughter's personality because the bullying began. Her daughter's grades have suffered, she has been prescribed antidepressants by a therapist as well as the family has discussed homeschool.
"She was our outgoing, bubbly child then on this she’s very withdrawn now," the girl's mother said. "She's changed user names, she's changed accounts, but they still find her."
Julie Scherzinger, a counselor at Sunset Ridge Secondary school in West Jordan, said my wife not received reports of bullying on ask.fm yet, but knows of students at her school who make use of the website.
"Facebook isn't as popular anymore," she said. "It's mainly Twitter, Instagram or Ask.fm."
But she said why is Ask.fm particularly troubling is its anonymous nature. Unlike Facebook, which has a person's name and travels to lengths to delete artificial accounts, or perhaps Twitter, which requires some form of username that could be blocked, Ask.fm users are susceptible to posts with zero identifiers.
"They will just post whatever questions they need on there plus it’s proper to view," Scherzinger said. "People say items that typically you wouldn’t say, even about the normal Internet."
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