Date: Friday, August 3, 2007
Teachers call for YouTube Shutdown
At their recent annual conference the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) have passed a motion asking for YouTube to be closed following the huge increase in cyber-bullying.
A sharp increase in the amount of online bullying both of teachers and pupils has resulted in teachers at the PAT conference calling for one of the main offending sites, YouTube to be closed down. Although this will upset many of its millions of users, teachers insist it is necessary, and that teachers have the right to do their job without fear or intimidation, and that children should not have to suffer the isolation of cyber bullying. Thousands of videos of children taunting and harassing other children and teachers have appeared online, as well as the online harassment being enacted on sites such as RateMyTeachers. One particularly horrific posting showed a doctored picture of a teacher with their head cut off and a caption saying ‘you’re dead’. Teachers argue that such treatment of their colleagues should not be tolerated, and something has to be done. They also cite a survey of 15 000 pupils over five years which reports that one in five pupils suffered cyber bullying at one point or another, and that this has increased from14.5% to 20.6% in the last five years.
However many anti-bullying organisations have said that shutting down YouTube is not the way to deal with the problem of cyber-bullying. One organisation called Beatbullying even went as far as to say that shutting down websites such as these as a way of combatting bullying was akin to shutting down schools for the same reason. What teachers and anti-bullying organisations are not disagreed upon is that something has to be done to halt the rapid rise in online bullying, but they have different opinions as to the best way to go about it. Users of YouTube also seem not to agree with the teachers as they have stated that bullies will just find other online mediums to pursue their victims through, and that removing YouTube will not eradicate the problem.
Sources:
Times Online
BBC New
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