Writing About Online Bullying

In the summer of 2014, I was equally deep into freelance writing as mothering. This meant that my days started at the crack of dawn, coffee in hand, typing fingers at the ready. I kept my stature as still and as quiet as possible, not out of pristine habits, but out of fear of waking any one of my three children or one puppy. The sound of little feet running down the stairs was my signal to swap the role or writer for mother; an alarm bell trigger with a Pavlovian response to slip my laptop closed.

I had been freelance writing in print and online for six years by then and my thoughts on the state of the Internet were as entrenched as my routines were. I understood that there was cruelty online and I thought that I was, for the most part, immune to it.

To the astute reader: You may be cringing right now, knowing where my story is going. You’re spot on. Hang in there with the blinders-on version of me, circa 2014. She needs us.

That summer my husband, Jason, and I celebrated our 12^th wedding anniversary so I did what we writers do: I wrote a tidy article for The Huffington Post titled, “12 Secrets Happily Married Women Know.” I added in a wedding picture, sent it off to my editor, and didn’t think about it again, until a few days later when I went to the site’s Facebook page to see how my article was doing.

Still with me, cringers?

We tell our writers to, “never read the comments” and what I saw that day showed me exactly why we do this. Because the comments that were coming in on my article weren’t about marriage or weddings, my article or my writing, they were about me, and how fat I looked in my wedding dress.

Here are two of the comments that were written about me:

WE GET IT! huffnpuff..you love fat women..we get it…enough is enough……

One thing you didn’t learn is “don’t marry a heifer.”

I’m not going to sugar coat anything here. Even though I had been writing online for several years, I was an adult, and I had an amazing support system, I was devastated when I read those comments.

I only showed them to my husband because I was also embarrassed and ashamed that this is how I was viewed and I decided to take a break from my online world, a space that had been a huge source of connectivity for me. In a lot of ways, I was alone that summer; 100% by choice, but still alone.

A few months later, when I had pulled myself away from the sadness and hurt that I had been feeling, I wrote a second article for xoJane. This one was called, “It Happened To Me: I Wrote An Article About Marriage And All Anyone Noticed Is that I’m Fat.” In this article I said two things: Let’s not talk about each other’s bodies and let’s all be a whole lot kinder to each other online.

This article went viral reminding me that there is a whole lot of kindness in this world. I definitely needed to see that.

Right after all of this, something much more interesting happened at my house. My own daughter decided that she would like to be online. Her friends were starting to use Instagram and she wanted in.

I have to tell you this:

After the way that I had just been talked about online, I looked into the eyes of my very smart, mature, and kind tween who could probably handle toe-tipping into the online world, all I felt was her baby eyes looking back at me and all I wanted was to protect her.

So I answered her in a gut-reaction, knee-jerk way, and said, “no.” I didn’t parent, I didn’t grasp the teachable moment, I reacted out of fear.

A few days later, I realized that I had three choices in this matter:

1. I could continue with my non-parenting, “no” stance and keep her offline for forever and ever. This was tempting.
2. I could be the hero, say, “yes,” and cross my fingers that nothing bad would happen to her once she was online. This was also tempting.
3. Or I could teach her what she needed to know about how the Internet is meant to be used. This was, in fact, not at all tempting. But it was the right thing to do.

So she and I sat down together and took a look at how I use Instagram. We discussed why I “like” every post in my feed, why I participate in some memes and skip others, why I only post where we are after we’ve already left. We also took a look at other people’s posts. We discussed the good things we saw, as well as the negative ones, and we brainstormed what she would do if she was scrolling or posting on her own.

This was my turning point.

I realized that our children, our digital natives, are maneuvering online largely without guidance. They view the Internet as a parameter-less space, because no one is teaching them otherwise. And all of the same mistakes that we made when we were young—impulsive, thoughtless, not realizing our own impact—are amplified by the fact that the Internet makes our voices carry so much louder and so much further.

What I saw firsthand is that the modern issue that we are faced with is not that “kids these days” are bad or more poorly behaved than we were. I bet many of us can attest to this! It’s just that they are growing up maneuvering on the Internet, an unvetted playing field.

Once I realized this, I decided to grasp at the chance to take the lemons that I had been handed—being called fat online—and make lemonade—use my teaching roots to write a book on how to teach our children to be kind online.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Kindness Wins was published in the spring of 2015 and that fall I gave my TEDx Talk, “Raising A Digital Kid Without Ever Having Been One.” Today, I teach online courses to parents and teachers on how to teach our children how the Internet is meant to be used.

Since I first saw the comments that were written about me, I’ve told the story of why I decided to write my book many times. But the very first time that I did so was when I had to tell my own children the kinds of things that people had written about me online. This was very humbling for me and very surprising for them. They had no idea that this is the state of the Internet right now.

When I began telling my story to adults, however, I often saw nods of recognition and empathy rather than surprise; they knew full well what the Internet was and is like. My goal is for enough of us to work together to change this narrative so when exposed to negativity and cruelty online, we all react like my children did—with surprise. I’ll know that I’ve “succeeded” when online cruelty is shocking because it’s outdated and online kindness is the norm; a just-the-way-it-is expectation—as it should be.

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Galit Breen is the author of Kindness Wins, a simple no-nonsense guide to teaching our kids how to be kind online and the TEDx Talk, “Raising A Digital Kid Without Ever Having Been One.” She helps parents and teachers teach their children how the Internet is meant to be used at TheseLittleWaves.NET and tweets at @GalitBreen.

You can read the first chapter of Kindness Wins by clicking right HERE.

Tags: featured, online bullying, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips