“It hurt her at first, of course, but we talked to her and made her realize, just ignore it,” Mr. Timm said. “And a lot of the good people on there came and told her, ‘Just don’t even pay attention, don’t answer, just let them be and they’ll go pick on somebody else.’”
“She realizes that if she wants to do this, it’s one of those things you have to put up with.”
Avery’s mother, Cassandra Timm, a psychiatric nurse, says Avery’s been a “good sport” about the negative comments and that the attention has been good for her “pride and self-esteem.”
“She deletes anything negative and she enjoys anything positive. She enjoys watching the hit number go up.”
Ms. Timm said the videos are her daughter’s outlet since her disability prevents her from playing many sports in their small community. She has set some rules around the videos: Avery has to get her homework done first, she must leave her bedroom door open when she’s recording them and she isn’t allowed to engage in private chats with strangers.
Is Ms. Timm worried about who is watching?
“To some degree, but at the same time I’ve accepted that the Internet’s the Internet and there’s just going to be no way of keeping images of my children off of there,” she said.
“I’m not going to take away the only hobby she has that she enjoys.”
Indeed, Prof. Gallagher wonders if having hundreds of thousands of views before you’re in high school will soon be par for the course.
“Because social networking is so much a norm, I’m not sure that it would occupy the kind of space and attention that we give it – we who didn’t grow up with this – as children who see it as part of their landscape.”
But Toronto bullying expert Peggy Moss isn’t so sure. When she speaks with teachers and parents at her workshops, she finds many have retained crystal clear memories of their own bullies, even 35 years later.
“We’re starting to know what the impact of bullying is. We have a better sense of how much that wounds us going forward,” said the former hate-crime prosecutor.
Ms. Moss said that while kids who “stick out” have long acted out to regain some control over their lives, the few boundaries that exist at school around bullying often disappear on the Web.
“My concern with the Internet is that we don’t yet know all of the ramifications around the interactions in that space.”
