“You don’t want to be known for that, when it’s not even something that you do, or who you are,” said Jackie, 17, a soon-to-be senior who teaches confirmation classes at her church.
At Pasadena High School in California, like most high schools, rumors and embarrassing photos spread through private message groups and social networks like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Once the gossip is online, it’s hard to delete.
While tech companies promise to monitor bullying, few have had success policing it.
As complaints rose about about harassment, YouTube tried to force people to use their real names when posting comments on videos, but had to backtrack amid an uproar. Facebook invited students onto its campus this year for a forum on safer Internet practices. And Twitter in April made it easier to flag bullies after the company’s then-CEO admitted in a memo, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls.”
Pasadena High is trying something different, too. With help from a Sebastopol nonprofit, the school has taken the uncommon stance of placing some responsibility for policing online bullying on its students — and in some cases, on bullying victims themselves. The students are learning to confront bullies, responding to put-downs with positive posts, or distracting their friends with real-world activities so they don’t become bullies online.
“The students are in the best position to interrupt, prevent or de-escalate something before an adult knows about it,” said Rick Phillips, executive director of Community Matters in Sebastopol.
One reason social networks struggle to control abuse is because it is so common. In 2012, University of Wisconsin-Madison research showed that there were more than 15,000 bullying-related tweets out of 250 million public tweets a day. The number of daily tweets has since grown to 500 million.
“A lot of times, people see bullying as physical — like in the movies when they take your lunch money and grab your backpack,” said Kaycee James, who is entering her senior year at Pasadena High. “Here, it’s not like that.”
Companies say it’s up to users to report these incidents, but many students don’t. Kaycee, 17, has been called ugly on Twitter because of her beauty mark, but didn’t report it because she didn’t think it would help.
“There’s nothing really I can do, because you can’t really change people’s minds about what they say about you, and even if I stand up for myself and say, ‘That sucks,’ in the end, a lot of people don’t care,” Kaycee said.
Teachers are of little assistance online — they often aren’t friends with students on social media, making it difficult to monitor harassment. And in general, bullying after school hours or off campus isn’t something the district is responsible for unless it has a direct impact on learning.
“They can do it at a home computer or at the library. It’s difficult for the school to respond,” said Andrew King, an assistant principal at Pasadena High. “Students have the right to post. ... . We just wish the students were more mature in their postings.”
At Pasadena High School, a cyberbully has plenty of places to hide. A Twitter profile called PHS Confessions popped up last year, spreading anonymous rumors. Students privately sent gossip to the account, and the user broadcast it to hundreds of followers.
Jackie still doesn’t know who called her a slut, or wrote other derogatory comments on PHS Confessions.
“Nobody knows who it came from, because nobody knows who runs the page, and nobody knows who sent in that confession or statement about somebody,” Jackie said.
Last year, after her name appeared on PHS Confessions, Jackie tried not to dwell on it — at least outwardly.
When her AP Chemistry teacher asked her to be a leader in the school’s antibullying program, she was more than ready.
The Safe School Ambassadors Program began 15 years ago and has now spread to roughly 2,000 schools. Phillips came up with it after the Columbine massacre, which led schools to install metal detectors and hire armed guards. But, Phillips said, that strategy missed dangers that get past the metal detectors.
“There were unseen weapons. The weapons of prejudice, of stereotyping. The weapons of bias. Grudges that the neighborhood brings into the school,” Phillips said. “The schools were not focusing on the source of the problem. They were focusing on the response to the problem.”
The program was initially designed to deflect in-person bullying, but in recent years, more students have brought up examples of cyberbullying.
At Pasadena High School, staff members identified 33 students representing different cliques and pulled them out of class for two days of training.
Community Matters hopes the training will spark change and assertiveness in the school’s culture.
On the first day, instructors lined up students and faculty members and asked a series of questions. If their answer was “yes,” they stepped forward.
Had they seen fights at school? Been ridiculed because of their bodies, or called derogatory names?
Jackie stepped forward. So did several of her peers.
“It was pretty amazing to see that I’m not the only one. That we’re all in the journey together,” Jackie said.
The program suggests that students respond to online abuse in different ways. When a student is being put down, ambassadors are urged to balance it out by saying something positive about the victim. When friends are thinking about posting something mean online, they are told to steer the conversation to a different topic.
In a classroom skit, Jackie played the bully and Kaycee the ambassador.
“She thinks she knows everything,” Jackie said in character. “The shoes she’s wearing are so last year. I’m going to post something on PHS Confessions.”
Kaycee tried to distract her.
“Did you see this picture? It’s so funny,” she said.
Community Matters says its program reduces suspensions. It used a grant to help fund a 2011 report showing that suspension rates dropped an average of 33 percent at schools that adopted the ambassadors program, while rates at schools that didn’t have the program rose 10 percent.
Student ambassadors prevented problems before they escalated, said Alexander White, who worked on the report.
After training, Jackie felt energized and said she planned to speak up to the boys who had harassed her. She said guys would walk up to her and smack her butt “just because it’s there.” She never told her teachers.
“That’s the hardest thing, sticking up for myself,” Jackie said.
But acting as an ambassador isn’t easy. When Jackie tried to confront a guy about making fun of other girls, he started making fun of her.
“In real life, it is hard to think of the actual terms used in the session when you are in the moment trying to better a situation,” Jackie said.
Administrators at Pasadena High said they will step in to support ambassadors and hold follow-up meetings. Already, the district said it there have been fewer suspensions, in part due to programs like the ambassadors training.
It can take as long as three days to shut down pages like PHS Confessions, King said.
“It’s like whack-a-mole,” he said. “You hit them down as they come.”
Since the page was taken down in February 2014, several accounts have popped up on social media detailing fights and other rumors. Students are already speculating about when another PHS Confessions, or something like it, will reappear.
“We’re not going to change the school in a day,” King said. “If we change incrementally every day, a little bit, we’re going to move the school in the right direction.”
But Jackie says she’s ready. She wants to remain an ambassador for life.
“At first my friends made fun of me, because they thought it was some nerdy thing, like we had badges or something,” Jackie said. But eventually, she said, they realized that she was trying to better both herself and her environment. “I was a student making a difference.”
Shortly after an ambassador assembly, a student ran his hand up her leg at school. She smacked his hand away and changed seats.
And then, for the first time, she spoke up. “Today you got too touchy. I didn’t like it,” Jackie wrote to him in a Facebook message. “Don’t do that again.”
“He hasn’t bothered me since,” she said.
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.