Last Wednesday, 13th April, the Parents’ Association arranged a talk for parents by a company called Bully4You represented on the night by Kevin Deering and Jim Harding. Bully4You is a not-for-profit organisation helping schools, parents and teenagers to understand the deep effects of bullying and cyber bullying in particular. With the advent of modern communications and technology, people all over the world are engaging with society like never before.
Today’s generation of teenagers are connecting in new ways and have a new audience thanks to the ease of access to social networking websites, video and photograph sharing sites. While email, instant messaging and sites such as Snapchat and Facebook etc are allowing young people to communicate in a free and easy unsupervised manner, the anonymous, instant and far reaching technological possibilities have also brought a new dimension to bullying. When they are online, young people can hide behind the anonymity that the internet offers.
The very informative talk given by Jim and Kevin helped us as parents to understand, what is probably just the tip of the iceberg, what exactly is involved in the area and – most importantly – their message to communicate with our children as best we can to protect them from the negative effects of such cyber bullying.
Many prefects as well as parents and the Headmaster, Mr Chris Lumb as well as School Counsellor, Ms Mary Maume and the Rector and Director of Ethos, Fr Michael Sheil SJ, attended this informative talk and I think all who attended were grateful for the information delivered in such an eloquent manner by the team from Bully4You.
Susanna Cawley, Parents’ Association Chairperson