Michigan was the 48th state to pass anti-bullying legislation, but it may be one of the first to develop clinical treatment for those affected by bullying.

William Beaumont Hospital, of Royal Oak, is expected to open a clinic to help victims of bullying, bullies, bystanders and families on May 4.

Kevin Epling, a major proponent of Michigan’s anti-bullying law, said the concept is on the cutting-edge of bullying therapy.

“I’ve not heard of anything like this taking place in a hospital,” said Epling. “Most of these are providers that parents would have to find such as counselors or someone at the general community health office.”

Dr. Marlene Seltzer, director of the No Bullying Live Empowered (NoBLE) Center, stumbled upon the idea while practicing gynecology through the years.

“I’ve always been interested in the psycho-socio issues of medicine like domestic violence, and gynecology has a lot of those type of issues in that field,” said Seltzer, who’s been an OB/GYN for nearly 16 years. “It wasn’t so far to go from domestic violence to bullying as an area of interest.”

Depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, stomach-aches, headaches, insomnia, bedwetting and suicide are all potential consequences of bullying, according to Seltzer.

After hearing of a Florida teen being videotaped as she was bullied by several of her classmates, Seltzer said she knew she had to get involved.

“For some reason, that really struck a chord with me that we’ve gotten to a point in our society where kids beat each other up and post it on YouTube, and we are all just OK with that,” she said. “That put me on the path toward trying to do something about this issue.”

She contacted Alonzo Lewis, Beaumont Children’s Hospital’s vice president of women’s and children’s services, to discuss a solution.

“Wow, wouldn’t this be a neat project for us to launch,” recalled Lewis on his initial meeting with Seltzer. “(NoBLE) would bring some new patient volume to Beaumont and service a need that doesn’t have enough support in the community.”

Originally, Seltzer planned to combat bullying through a hotline, but she quickly realized that wasn’t enough. She said the NoBLE Center’s main goal will be to provide mental health services to youth (K-12) impacted by bullying through individual and group therapy. However, Seltzer said it will not directly prescribe medication.

Community outreach will be another vital area if the center is to meet its full potential.

“Beaumont already has relationships with schools in the area and so we’ll use those already established relationships to go face-to-face and meet with superintendents, principals, counselors and teachers to really explain the program and answer any questions they have,” said Seltzer. “So when they refer students, they’re referring them to something they’re familiar with.”

Lewis said that after hearing Seltzer propose the concept for the center, funding became the biggest concern. But thanks to the hospital’s support and several donations, NoBLE has secured about $350,000 as of March 30.

“So far, we’ve been very lucky to receive funds from the Children’s Miracle Network and also from Beaumont Children’s hospital,” said Seltzer. “We’ve had a private family foundation donate some money and we’re about to embark on a fundraising campaign. What we’re hoping is that this issue has unfortunately touched so many people’s lives but that people will want to do something and support us.”

The NoBLE Center, which will be on campus in the medical office building, is starting small, with four mental health providers plus Seltzer, and she hopes to expand depending on the need for treatment.

Although the project is in the early stages of development, Lewis said he’s confident about its potential.

“Beaumont Hospital is a leader in cardiovascular medicine, robotic surgery, transplant surgery… So, we’re a leader in all these sophisticated medical programs, and this type of program (NoBLE) positions us to be a leader, as well. I have no doubt that as soon as our program grows we’re going to get calls from all over the country in terms of ‘How did you make this happen?’ and ‘Can we use your model to develop a program or service in our state?’”

As states and universities adopt more anti-hazing laws, there is evidence that hazing is a legal issue around the world. The Philippines, for example, has a national anti-hazing law. In the United States, hazing is regulated at state and local levels.

Hazing laws vary by state, so one collective definition does not yet exist. Hazing as defined by Jacinda Boucher, author of Hazing and Higher Education, “encompasses an extensive range of behaviors and activities, ranging from seemingly innocuous activities such as blindfolding and scavenger hunts, to more dangerous and extreme physical punishments, including sleep deprivation and excessive exercise.”

Hank Nuwer, hazing author and public speaker, defines bullying as mean or dangerous behavior meant to exclude someone from a group; His contrasting definition of hazing is bringing someone into a group, even if it is silly or demeaning. The problem according to Nuwer is that hazing can also be bullying in such cases like a football team not wanting a member to join.

Glenn Stutzky, clinical social worker at Michigan State University, defines hazing as group bullying. Everyone’s definition is a little different which makes talking about the same thing difficult.

The idea of going to college leaves many students looking for a sense of belonging. This is a time when senior members of organizations can jump at the opportunity to initiate new members into their group the same way that was done to them. According to Stutzky, the people allowing themselves to be bullied are also in the wrong.

According to one of the largest national hazing surveys coordinated by Dr. Nadine C. Hoover of Alfred University, hazing is a widespread issue. The study, including over 60,000 student athletes from 2,400 colleges and universities, found “over 325,000 athletes at more than 1,000 National Collegiate Athletic Association schools participated in intercollegiate sports during 1998-99. Of these athletes, more than a quarter million experienced some form of hazing to join a college athletic team.”

Hoover adds that of those roughly 250,000 students, “One in five was subjected to unacceptable and potentially illegal hazing. They were kidnapped, beaten or tied up and abandoned. They were also forced to commit crimes, destroying property, making prank phone calls or harassing others.”

A large number of universities have recently and swiftly developed hazing laws due to public pressures. According to Nuwer, 44 states have laws forbidding hazing, with Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming being the exceptions. States that view hazing as a general term, reason that hazing is a perpetual way of life or argue that without physical proof, it is too hard to prove in court.

According to the law firm of Manley Burke, hazing punishments vary state to state, but in most states, hazing is considered a misdemeanor with fines of up to $5,000. The problem states are having is with reporting incidents. Nuwer says that working toward a federal law is critical to solving the bullying problem because the number of incidents reported is crucial.

Massachusetts is working toward enforcing mandatory hazing reporting to fix this problem. States like Florida and New Hampshire have some of the most advanced hazing laws. Florida has three laws to manage hazing at universities and colleges both public and private, while New Hampshire classifies hazing as a misdemeanor.

According to The Greek Shop website (http://www.thegreekshop.com/hazing) in Illinois, Idaho, Missouri, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, fatal hazing or hazing inflicting bodily harm is considered a felony. Some states, including Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma and Rhode Island, recognize the mental and physical sides of hazing. Stutzky says most injuries are not physical, but mental and emotional. Delaware, Pennsylvania and Tennessee require colleges to have written hazing policies, and many universities are following suit. Florida and Kentucky require written hazing laws with punishments.

The Alfred University study says hazing is most likely to occur on campuses in eastern or southern states. Eastern and western states have the most alcohol-related hazing while southern and western states have the most dangerous hazing. Women are most likely to be involved with alcohol-related hazing. Male athletes who play soccer, lacrosse, swim or dive are most at risk for hazing in general, while football players are most likely to be dangerously or illegally hazed. The Study found athletes and coaches agree on a few ways to prevent hazing; introduce clear anti-hazing messages, expect responsibility from athletes, and offer team bonding supervised by a coach.

It seems a combination of strictness from Greek national offices and high schools is the next step toward preventing hazing. These two crucial places need to focus on hazing prevention from an early stage rather than minimizing individual liability. Nuwer says education is the most important way to combat hazing because if you get bystanders to step in, others will, also.

On March 24 a group of eighth grade students from Dearborn, Mich.’s Unis Middle School visited the Society of Professional Journalists Conference on the campus of Michigan State University. The students are involved with their own journalistic site entitled “The Living Textbook,” in which the student’s cover stories pertaining to their interest and that of the community around them. During their visit we got a chance to sit down with a few of them to discuss what they thought about the concept of bullying. They opened up as to what they believe their definition of bullying is, along with their various experiences of bullying situations.

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When Sean Paul Brinston joined the Navy, he didn’t know that piling charred human feces would be how he would serve his country.

While in Afghanistan, Navy corpsman Brinston’s platoon was ordered by a sergeant to tidy up a burn pit — a landfill of garbage, thrown-out food and human defecation.

“All of the stuff down there is anything you can think of, and at night coyotes get down there,” said Brinston, who is based at a naval medical center in Portsmouth, Va.

The company reluctantly began the daunting task, an experience that Brinston now considers hazing.

“We used to burn the ‘wag bags’ (bags of feces) at night, but some of them weren’t burned that day because everyday bags get thrown down there,” he said. “It smelled horrible.”

In another instance, Brinston said his platoon was ordered to cover all the sand in the compound with gravel just to kill time. About five hours later, on a 120-degree day, the commanding officer said that roughly 800 square feet was enough.

Brinston and his platoon were ordered to cover the base with gravel to keep them busy. He considers this one of many ways he was hazed in the military.

The word hazing alone still gives former Army Staff Sgt. William Titus chills.

“I’m not touching that with a 16-foot pole.”

Even 40 years after his service in the Army, including two tours in Vietnam, Titus remains tight-lipped about hazing in the military for fear of repercussions. His motto is simple:

“One man hazes as another man grazes.”

Although the U.S. military doesn’t report hazing statistics, there have been several media reports that indicate that hazing is still an issue.

One of the most publicized incidents happened on April 3, 2011, when Marine Lance Cpl. Harry Lew committed suicide while serving in Afghanistan. Prior to his death, he had been reportedly punched and kicked in the head, ordered to do leg lifts with sandbags and had sand poured on his face, among other things. Two of the three marines accused of hazing Lew stood trial. One was found not guilty and another accepted a plea deal for a 30-day jail sentence. The third marine is still awaiting trial.

Following Lew’s death, several members of the House of Representatives including his aunt, U.S. Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-Calif.), teamed up to shed light on the issue of military hazing. The legislators wrote letters to the House Armed Services Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, requesting that the groups hold hearings on the matter.

“The highest military officials must make eliminating hazing a top priority,” said Chu, in a statement. “They must stop pretending there is no problem None of this will change until the Secretary of Defense commits to eradicate the culture of hazing that is so ingrained within our troops. Service members in positions of responsibility in the field must be made to feel that they should stop hazing when they see it, rather than encourage it, or turn the other way.”

The subculture of hazing took center stage once again on Feb. 4, 2012, when the Navy reported that eight sailors aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard were discharged for strangling and beating a fellow sailor as an initiation rite that was caught on video.

Initiation rites, like line-crossing ceremonies, are customary in the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. In a line-crossing ceremony, veteran sailors (shellbacks) initiate their shipmates who haven’t crossed the Equator (pollywogs). Common practices include spraying “wogs” with fire hoses, locking them in stocks and enclosing them in coffins filled with salt water. These rituals, originally used to ensure new sailors could handle life at sea, escalated over time and have even led to deaths.

The U.S. isn’t the only country with rampant military hazing. Foreign armed forces were also found to have a number of hazing altercations according to the U.S. Department of State’s 2010 Human Rights Report.

Russia’s military is one of the most infamous for hazing. The country’s ministry of defense reported 14 servicemen died from being hazed in 2010. However, the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, a human rights organization, estimates that the number of hazing deaths to be around 2,000. In 2009, the group said it received 9,523 complaints of military hazing.

“The complaints mostly concerned beatings, but also included sexual abuse, torture, and enslavement,” according to the report. “Soldiers often did not report hazing to unit officers or military prosecutors due to fear of reprisals, since in some cases officers allegedly tolerated or even encouraged hazing as a means of controlling their units.”

Hazing among Russia servicemen revolves around “”dedovshchina”, a Russian term, which can literally be translated as “rule of the grandfathers”. “Ded”, Russian for grandfather, refers to senior conscripts, which subject lower ranks to humiliating activities and abuse. According to military officials, abuse in the military, particularly dedovschina increased 150 percent, in the first six months of 2010 compared to the previous year.

Other nations that reported military hazing as an issue include: Japan, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Ukraine.

Although Italy’s human rights report didn’t mention hazing as an issue, the country’s military has a term similar to dedovshchina, called “nonnismo,” which means hazing in Italian, but stems from the word “nonno,” meaning grandfather.

Brinston said that hazing could be worse in foreign militaries because in some cases there are no rules or a lack of enforcement. But even in the U.S. military, he said there’s a lack of enforcement.

Corpsman Sean Paul Brinston, on the far left, served in Afganistan.

As of July 2005, the Navy defines hazing as “any conduct whereby a military member or members, regardless of service or rank, without proper authority causes another military member or members, regardless of service or rank, to suffer or be exposed to any activity which is cruel, abusive, humiliating, oppressive, demeaning, or harmful.”

Navy policy, like rules of other U.S. military branches, states that hazing will not be tolerated. Although Brinston said rules have helped, he still believes hazing will never be put to an end.

“A lot guys don’t even know they are being hazed. They come in not knowing what’s right from wrong, and they’re told to shut up and go with the flow.”

By Tony Briscoe, Nicholas Roddy and Dmitri Barvinok
Staff writers

If lockers and linoleum tiles could talk, they would tell an unpleasant tale of students around the United States.

Bullying has become an increasingly popular topic to a major research group that indicates 28 percent of all students between 12 to 18 years old are victims of maltreatment.

More than 47 percent of bullied students have reported that they have been victimized specifically in school hallways and stairwells, according to the U.S Department of Education’s National Center for Education statistics.

Another nine percent of victims said they were bullied in the bathroom or locker room while another six percent are harassed on the school bus.

This comes as no surprise to high school teacher Carman Smith. An English teacher at Wylie E. Groves High School in Beverly Hills, Mich., Smith said he has to intervene in bullying altercations at least once a day.

“A lot of times it happens in between classes in the hallways, it happens in the locker rooms, it happens in common areas, before school, after schools, on the bus, at the bus stop…I would say most happen outside of the classroom.”

While many students reported being bullied in transition, 33 percent of victims identified the classroom as a bullying focal point.

Smith said that Groves teachers are more than capable of handling bullying in the classroom. The school, roughly 1,400 students, has anti-bullying policies as well as prevention programs such as peer mediation.

“It is a part of our house rules that we report any type of hazing or bullying or someone being treated unfairly,” said Smith. “Each individual case is handled separately, so the actual consequences depend on the situation.”

The district also has had seminars where teachers undergo training on how to resolve bullying situations.

One of the biggest problems the group is struggling to manage now is cyberbullying. According to a 2011 Pew Internet report, eight percent of students have been bullied online in the last 12 months. Smith, who’s been teaching since 2002, said bullying has become unmanageable problem because issues online now spill into the classroom.

Today, 82 percent of children have an online presence before they turn two, according to a recent study by AVG, an Internet security company, so maintaining a safe web of social networks is important.

“I think bullying has always been there, but it’s gotten worse because of cyberbullying,” said Smith. “It’s brought on a whole new phenomenon.  The access these kids have to the Web, and what they can do with the Web, it’s brought bullying to a whole new level.”

Since bullying has gone beyond the schoolyard, Smith says it’s up to parents to monitor their children’s activity. He encourages parents to create their own social media pages in order to supervise their kids.

“I think more parental control of these social media sites could help the problem. I have no business going on a student’s Facebook or Twitter page. There’s only so much I can do in the (school) hours.”

Michigan Sen. Rick Jones gets up at 5:30 a.m. every day to meet constituents in a coffee shop, but it was in his office where  he met with the mother of a cyber bullying victim. She showed him messages posted on her daughter’s Facebook profile, which made the afraid to go to school.

The messages were horrible, Jones said.

Jones is a sponsor of Matt’s Safe School Law.

With the recent passing of Matt’s Safe School Law in Michigan, bullying victims and parents can feel confident that trends in bullying will decrease in the state.

Matt’s Safe School Law was passed on December 6, 2011, and requires every school district in the state to draft an anti-bullying policy within the next six months. The policies will be submitted to the State Board of Education and reviewed.

The law came to fruition largely with the help of Matt’s father, Kevin Epling, who wanted to help prevent parents from suffering the same loss he suffered. In 2002, Matt took his own life after he was bullied by upperclassmen.

“One of the old adages was that bullies have low self-esteem,” said Epling, also co-director of Bully Police USA, an anti-bullying advocacy group. “What we’re finding more and more is that bullies have a very high self-esteem and a lot of the bullies tend to be the teacher’s pet. They’ll do everything the teacher says, so they’re not noticed as the bully, but they’ll turn around and do something to you behind their back.”

With the passing of the law, 48 states now have anti-bullying legislation, leaving South Dakota and Montana on the outside looking in. One of the reasons for the increased pressure on anti-bullying legislation is because the federal government and various political organizations are now labeling bullying as a crime.

For his next batch of legislation, Jones is looking at cyber-bullying legislation.

Potential legislation runs into First Amendment issues, he said, since freedom of speech permits people to express themselves online.

“I think it goes beyond freedom of speech,” Jones said, referring back to the hurtful Facebook messages.

According to the National Conference of State Legislators, all 50 states have laws to combat cyberstalking, cyberharrasment, and cyberbullying, but not every state has protections against each. For example, Michigan has no explicit law against cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying is defined as cyberharrasment that takes place in school or targets minors.

Patrick Corbett, a professor of criminal law at Cooley Law School, says that teens are often unaware that they’re breaking the law when they bully on Facebook.

In fact, when shown threatening text messages, many high school students are unfazed, Corbett said, believing that to be fairly normal communication.

For example, there are already laws that prohibit a person from posting messages, true or false, on social networks or through text messaging, if their intent is to harass another individual.

Another method of bullying in high schools is creating a fake Facebook account to post embarrassing information, photos or messages. In some states, this is identity theft, and if the postings cause two or more people to contact the victimized student, a second charge is added, one that is punishable by a maximum of two years in prison.

“I question whether or not new statutes are needed,” Corbett said.

Juvenile cases are not prosecuted very often, potentially leading the public to believe that these kinds of offenses go unpunished.

“Anecdotally, I think a lot of these are being handled in the school,” Corbett said.

If cyberstalking and online harassment incidents continue to rise, and if media coverage continues to cover resulting tragedies, prosecutors may begin bringing more and more juveniles to court, to set an example and dissuade other teens. In some places around the country, this has already begun.

Recent cases in Florida and Illinois have brought the issue to national attention by taking teenagers to court. In Florida, two teenagers were charged with aggravated stalking of a minor after creating a fake Facebook page for their victim and using it to post inappropriate comments and photos. Similarly, in Illinois, a mother sued after her son was identified as gay on fake Facebook profile.

On Aug. 12, 2010, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli spoke at the Department of Education’s Bullying Summit in Washington, D.C. He stressed how the prevention of bullying falls not only on the shoulders of teachers and administrators, but also law enforcement and the federal government. In his speech, he introduced a new anti-bullying initiative through the Department of Justice. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention “is developing a five-bulletin series on the topic of peer victimization in schools based on three studies funded by OJJDP and conducted by the National Center for School Engagement,” Perrelli said in his speech.

In the first bulletin of the series, released in December 2011, the authors pointed out that bullying is a complex social and emotional phenomenon that impacts victims in many ways. However, in the entire bulletin, there are no mention of any statistics on the prevalence of bullying in America.

One of the most thorough studies on the statistics of bullying in American schools was conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2009. The study surveyed more than 25 million students between the ages of 12 and 18 for the 2008-2009 school year. The study showed that over 7 million students, or 28 percent of those studied, were bullied at school. The most common form of bullying was being called names or insulted. Other forms of bullying involved physical harm, social exclusion, and destruction of property.

According to the OJJDP’s website, the most common school crime in America is theft. The OJJDP found that about 20% of students were involved in theft crimes.

The disparity between these two statistics shows the Department of Justice does not view bullying as a crime because, according to the Department, the most common school crime is theft. As the state governments are moving forward with anti-bullying policy, the federal government is lagging behind.

Bullying is becoming more prevalent in conversations and within schools, the media and government.

David P. Farrington, professor of psychological criminology at Cambridge University, and other researchers seem to have come to a consensus that females mostly bully each other verbally and psychologically. While this may have always been true, the introduction of the Internet and the use of it by children of younger and younger ages seems to have increased the aggressiveness of the attacks.

Even with more harm being caused, it is still not always as easy to recognize bullying when it occurs among girls.

“Cyberbullying”, a 2007 report by Amanda Lenhart for the Pew Internet and American Life Project, says that girls are more likely than boys to gossip online, making them more subject to being the topic of online rumors.

In “Teenage Girls’ Perceptions of the Functions of Relationally Aggressive Behaviors”, Bridget Reynolds and Rena Repetti wrote that girls are also more likely to be relationally aggressive with other girls than boys are to be with each other. Relational aggression is a subtle and indirect tactic used to attack relationships between friends and hurting self-esteem. It can include rumors, denying friendships, ignoring or social exclusion from a group of friends.

In “Bullying: What are the Differences between Boys and Girls?” Tanya Beran, professor of school psychology, wrote in an article that the secretive nature of this bullying may mean the attacker does not get caught. The attacks are then likely to become longer and more severe.

This kind of bullying is hard for adults to detect because indirectness allows the bully to avoid face-to-face confrontation. Since it is usually hidden from adults, there is no physical behavior to see.

Bullying between girls often happens within a group of friends, making it extremely difficult to not just see it as a typical conflict between teenage girl friends.

Kirstie Kipfmiller, a Michigan State senior, experienced bullying from her friends in both elementary and high school.

“I was bullied in fifth grade for having buckteeth. I hated it. It would make me so upset; I just didn’t understand it, and it wasn’t something that I could change at the time. Now I have a great smile.

“More recently, in high school, particularly junior year, my class size was 36 kids. Some of my best friends and a majority of that class and upperclassmen turned on me. I’ve always been the girl that’s ‘one of the guys.’ Well, this came with repercussions.

“Since I hung out with guys all of the time, I think girls got jealous, maybe? Certain people would make up rumors about me getting with all of these guys, calling me a slut, making up rumors about how I messed around with so many guys at one time. This lasted forever. I would cry in school.

“My so-called ‘best friends’ would even ignore me or just do hurtful things. I got sick of it. I decided I was better than that and ended up switching schools my senior year. It was the best decision ever. No one thought I would actually do that. I remember sitting there, crying in math class, and people would be like, ‘Why don’t you just go to John Glenn?’ I would look at them and say, ‘Yeah, I will.’ And I did it. Stupid kids.

“To this day, I still hang out with mostly guys. Being friends with girls is too hard. There’s too much drama so I just stay away most of the time. I still get called a slut behind my back, but I grew up and realized that that stuff doesn’t matter. I’m better than that, and I know who I am.”

Andrew, 16 and in 10th grade, plays Minecraft at least an hour every day, usually after school. He spends his time building virtual castles and complex machinery in a game that combines the creative power of building blocks and the role-playing element of a video game. Most of the time, he and his friends play on servers where they are protected from griefers.

A griefer is a bully in the world of online games. Griefers don’t play by the rules and attempt to cause as much distress and discomfort for other players as possible.

In Minecraft, griefers go after the creations of other players.

“I’ve seen seven hours of work get completely destroyed,” Andrew said.

Though many servers have griefer protections in place, those protections sometimes get in the way of regular players, Andrew said. Sometimes, playing against a griefer can be fun, since it becomes a competition and the game suddenly has a villain. Other times, griefers trick their way into becoming administrators of a server and destroying everything the players have built, which could waste weeks of work.

Andrew admits to having griefed himself. It can be fun, he said.

Minecraft players can become quite attached to their creations, especially as it takes many days, sometimes months, to create particularly complex or large structures.

These creations are important to the players, even though they are virtual, Andrew said. Though it’s not quite on the same level as his real-life possessions, he, and other Minecraft players, are upset when their hard work is destroyed.

According to Mike Ambinder, an experimental psychologist at Valve Software in Bellevue, WA, many people get pleasure from griefing others, and it often becomes a competition to see who can cause the most chaos.

Griefing can be very similar to bullying, as Andrew and Ambinder attest.

“The mob mentality is a phenomenon that has been extensively studied and definitely seems to be at play here,” Ambinder said.

The more players are engaged in destructive behavior, the more likely others are to join in.

One of Andrew's Minecraft creations.

“When people don’t know each other personally, that will never happen,” Andrew said, referring to the server he and his friends run, but he admits that things are probably different on large, public servers.

There here have been griefing concerns in a bigger game. Recently, World of Warcraft and the company that produces it, Blizzard, have come under fire for being lax on cyberbullying.

World of Warcraft forums are full of players complaining that they have been repeatedly harassed, to the point where they’ve quit the game. Despite cyberbullying being against Blizzard’s terms of use, it is tough to report and punish the bullies. The game’s enormous player base –- more than 10 million subscribers in 2011 -– makes strict control difficult.

Cyberbullying is recognized as a legitimate threat on social networks, but video games are often overlooked as battlegrounds for the same kind of behavior. One World of Warcraft player complained on the forums that a group of players was harassing people by impersonating players and bothering others, bringing blame on their targets. This is similar to Facebook cyberbullying when high school students create fake profiles of fellow students. They then post humiliating information about them, or harass others under their assumed name.

Controlling and preventing griefing is difficult. In World of Warcraft, moderators attempt to ban bullies, but they can’t get them all, because there are so many players. Minecraft servers can be protected against griefers, but the safeguards interfere with legitimate play, Andrew said.

Not all Minecraft servers are protected from griefers.

Minecraft allows you to interact with animals.

“I think it should be individually up to every server or person,” Andrew said.

Even if the server has anti-griefer measures, truly determined players will download modifications to the game that allow them to bypass server protections.

“Research –- our own and that done by psychologists ‘in the wild’ -– seems to confirm that incentivizing positive behavior is stronger and leads to longer-lasting effects than punishing negative behavior,” Ambinder said.

At the end of the day, griefing hurts video games and gamers, Ambinder said, and Valve is hard at work trying to discourage it.

As for Andrew, he will continue building and protecting his creations, hidden away on a private server.

People need bullying facts and statistics to create effective anti-bullying programs.

Knowing the facts behind bullying and current bullying statistics are essential to accurately and knowledgeably discussing the subject and informing others. Relevant bullying facts can motivate others to join and create effective anti-bullying programs.

Bullying statistics build understanding and inform actions.

The issue could use more research. Although fresh bullying facts are hard to come by, and bullying statistics tell just part of the story, we have pulled together some of the most relevant bullying information to help you.

Cyberbullying facts and statistics, which were not tracked until recently, are essential to the bullying story.

This site provides bullying facts and statistics, as well as the stories that help describe new types of bullying that have emerged since the turn of the 21st century. These are links to bullying statistics:

*Statistics for Online Bullying

*What happens when bullies grow up

* Pew research study into cyberbullying

* U.S. Dept. of Education Analysis of State Bullying Laws and Policies, 2011

* Bullying in Schools: An Overview, U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

*Statistics and accounts of Workplace Bullying

The definition of hazing might have is as a tradition or ritual that social groups or teams display to show superiority or social hierarchy. Any hazing definition also includes issues of power, control and status. Hazing is sometimes called organized or group bullying.

The definition of hazing now varies by group or type of activity, but looking at a few examples of hazing, as this site does, will help lead to a hazing definition that is best suited to your situation.

For ideas about hazing and its definition, try these pages:

* New Wave: Anti-hazing laws

* Military Hazing: Rite or Wrong?

*Band Liaison: Hazing is never harmless

* Many universities have hazing definitions. Here is just one example, from Dartmouth.

* Delaware’s hazing definition is predicated on its creation as a law under the state’s education code.

* Utah law defines hazing in slightly different ways and carries harsher penalties.

* National Survey of Sports Teams gives statistics on hazing.

* Myths and facts about hazing from the University of Kansas.

Cyberbullying was defined – and the word coined – in 2001 by an educator concerned about bullying. The first cyberbullying definition was, “the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others.”

That cyberbullying definition has been changing ever since. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter came along in rapid succession a few years after cyberbullying was first defined. Each one has affected how we define cyberbullying.

New technology has changed legal definitions of cyberbullying. Laws about national security and discussions about civil rights are changing the way cyberbullying is defined and treated, too.

For such a new definition, cyberbullying has seen a lot of change. And no wonder. Here’s where you can get a clearer picture:

Facebook fights Bullying

Teens’ online world can be mean

Girls Bullying can be almost no secret

Cyberbullying shares some of the classic characteristics of regular bullying, but is carried out in new ways. StopCyberbullying.gov.

The Crimes Against Children Research Center does ongoing research into cyberbullying.

A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project details cyberbullying.