Schools, Cyberbullies, and the Surveillance State

Deborah Ahrens

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In recent years, parents, educators, and the media have expressed a rising concern about the prevalence of bullying in our schools. In particular, this concern has been brought to the forefront with the emergence of “cyberbullying” and “sexting”. In response to this perceived epidemic of poor student behavior, legislatures and school officials have adopted a variety of new laws and search policies. Most notably, they have adopted policies that give school officials the authority to search students’ electronic communication devices. This article narrates these developments, assesses their impact on the lives of students and the culture of our schools and then locates them in broader trends in schooling, parenting, and policing. More specifically, this article explores the degree to which our sharp spike in concern over traditional bullying, cyberbullying, and sexting, and our resort to the surveillance of student devices as a response to such a concern, reflects important lessons about our collective conception of student privacy, about the expectations that parents have of the role that school will play in their children’s lives, and about the transformation of public schools into public institutions focused on criminal law and criminal-law-like approaches to perceived social problems. When analyzed in cultural context, our schools’ initial response to concerns about cyberbullying and sexting is disquieting. Though understandable — indeed even predictable — the approaches we have thus far chosen do not reflect considered policy supported by empirical evidence, but, rather, one more step in the reorientation of American institutions generally, and public schools specifically, towards the reflexive adoption of surveillance and punishment as the response to any potentially serious problem.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2155814

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