The topic of the day on the office radio is not the flooding that has prevented one of my colleagues from reaching work. Oh no. It is the question of whether or not a ‘help’ button should be added to Facebook and Myspace in order to prevent online bullying for children. So why is this topic so important?

Well, according to i-safe, 42% of children in America have been bullied whilst online (I couldn’t easily find any statistics for the UK - though interestingly a page titled ‘where is all the UK bullying statistics’ ranked quite high up in the SERPs, but that’s another blog post!) so the issue seems to be prevalent in many young lives.

The debate is therefore: would the addition of a ‘help’ button reduce this percentage?

My view is…well…no, probably not. The belief that a ‘help’ button would prevent bullying rests upon the belief that children would use it. I’m not so sure this is the case. Research on bullying over the years has shown that the majority of victims are too scared to get help for fear of making bullying worse. And the internet is a bigger place than the playground, where anonymity rules and children access a range of social networking tools. The fear of making it worse is still very real in the virtual world.

Is online bullying any different?

However, as mentioned in many reports, the button is very small and it can’t harm to add it, even it only prevents/aids a very small number of cases. One life saved or one happy child should be worth a small amount of screen space.

My warning is that those that expect it to work miracles are making a distinction between online and offline bullying culture that doesn’t exist. Offline, the victim is often too scared to tell their teacher, parents, the police. Would a help button somewhere in the playground make any difference?