Bullies stopped this time

Brenda Holleman was stunned and sickened when she saw the supposedly funny "burn book" her daughter had heard about at school and looked up on the Web.

For every Wake County high school, there were entries describing girls, and some boys, as sluts, nuts and worse. Far worse.

"Oh, Lord," said Holleman, who works in mental health, "some kid's going to commit suicide because of this."

When the Wake County school system learned about the Web site (I'm such a blabbermouth), its communications office sent an immediate letter to the Web host, called Weebly, asking for the site to be taken down immediately.

Remarkably, Weebly agreed. Within days, the Web site had been removed.

"We were pleasantly surprised," said Michael Evans, director of communications for Wake schools.

Evans was surprised because Web hosts are under little obligation to remove offensive content, no matter who's complaining. Under Weebly's published rules, a John Doe lawsuit would normally need to be filed against the host and the issue would have to wend its way through the courts before Weebly would be required to remove any content.

Evans and other school administrators are not celebrating their victory just yet.

"We know that the landscape is constantly shifting," he said. "The technology is advancing more rapidly than our policies can keep up."

The burn book is a great example.

It's not that burn books, per se, are new. One was featured in the 2004 movie "Mean Girls" in which one group of girls uses the book and other methods to torment another. The books are passed around, gathering more and more gossip and insults, to the sick delight of some and the deep embarrassment of others, until discovered by a teacher or other authority figure. In which case, they are destroyed, or burned.

"Back when I was in high school, we called them slam books," said Jane Brown, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor of communications who studies adolescent female behavior, among other things. "It's a way of establishing pecking order among peers, and when you're a teen, your peer group is everything."

Back then, there was handwriting to help identify the participants. There was an actual book that could be confiscated.

Online, the slams are harsher and more sexually explicit. There are photos. One of the Wake high school entries even included blurry cell-phone video of a girl allegedly performing a sex act.

All of it posted anonymously and cached permanently somewhere, for a vast audience to see. There's also an array of venues for the maliciousness. Facebook, MySpace, texting, YouTube and other Web sites.

The school system blocks students' access to such sites and others with inappropriate content, but that's just during school hours and on school computers. After hours? It's no-holds-barred.

In some cases it amounts to cyber bullying. Wake County adopted a policy against cyber bullying several years ago that gives latitude to school officials to address cyber attacks, even outside school, when they come to officials' attention.

But Evans noted that in many cases, the perpetrators are difficult to pinpoint.

So, as with the burn book removed from Weebly, the only people identified are the targets.

"The real problem with online bullying is that it has real-life implications," Brown said. More than just momentary embarrassment, it can cause depression and long-term loss of self-esteem.

"All of us have emotional scars from high school, right?" Brown asked.

Imagine the scars one can get from being burned.