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A punch in the eye seems so passé. Bullies these days are traveling in packs and using cyberspace to their humiliating messages online. Like the toughies of old, they are both boys and girls and they demand nothing less than total submission as the price of peace. It’s a jungle out there. For school districts, patrolling the hallways and adjacent grounds is just a start. In the 21st century, a new kind of vigilance is necessary—an expanded jurisdiction that serves to both stave off legal actions and ensure a safe and productive learning environment.

Today’s principals rely on district policy and practice to extend the presumed long arm of the law to off-campus incidents. Potentially, that could mean plunging headlong into the electronic frontier to rescue student victims and thwart cyberbullying classmates who thrive as faceless computer culprits.

A December 2009 study by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society found that students on the receiving end report greater emotional distress, are more likely to abuse substances, and are more frequently depressed.

Researchers at IBM and MIT have found that certain e-mail connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

Cyber-bullying is back in the spotlight. Earlier this month the federal government announced it had established a Youth Advisory Group, consisting of young Australians, to advise it on cyber-bullying and other online issues.

TEENAGERS should think twice before posting personal information and photos on the internet, as they might come back to haunt them, privacy experts warn. Young people risked losing jobs or being embarrassed by teachers and relatives viewing party pictures or sexually explicit images uploaded on social networking websites, Victoria's Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey said. Ms Versey and privacy commissioners from the Asia-Pacific region and Canada will today launch "Think before you upload", an animated, online video warning young people of the dangers of documenting their life on the internet.

PARENTS have been urged to confiscate their children's mobile phones at night and monitor computer use after two year 9 students from the prestigious Sydney girls' school Ascham were forced to leave the school because of cyber-bullying.