Cyberbully – DVD - 2011 – Family film
This film works on some levels for the majority of viewers. It is rated as a family film as well as a film that can be used as an educational tool in a classroom setting.
This is the gist of the film. There is this beautiful blonde daughter, with beautiful clothes, who lives in a beautiful house, has beautiful friends, and has a beautiful blonde mother who for some unknown reason gives beautiful blonde daughter a computer for her seventeenth birthday and tells her she can keep it in her room where no one will see what she does on it.
The first thing BB daughter does is go into a chat room that a mother could die from and leave her computer unattended long enough for her little brother to go into her room and write something disgusting about her on it.
The rival of BB daughter takes over from there and suggests that BB daughter is a free spirit when it comes to sex and she has given some guys an STD. When the star football player reads that he dumps BB daughter and she falls so hard she hits the ground like a safe.
She tries to kill herself, goes to group counseling, gets better and goes back to school where she proceeds to lecture her classmates about what they say because they can hurt people with their words. Classmates cheer for her, the football star comes back to her – the end.
I have a few problems – big problems – with this film. It isn’t romantic to try to kill yourself and all too often suicide is the one thing that tormented teenagers do successfully. No one rides in on their white horse in real life to make it all better. How many years would a teenager have to go for counseling before she would have the courage to stand up in front of the school cafeteria and lecture her class? How often can you tie up bullying in a pretty ribbon and say the problem is fixed?
You never can. You can watch all the happy ending movies you can find and all your child will get from them is an even greater sense that they can’t make things in their world right. We need to be so careful about what we show to our children. What are we teaching them when we are trying to teach them something else? What do we tell them to do, which way to turn when we aren’t there with them and they can’t take anymore?
Schools are turning their backs in increasing numbers. Their hands are tied because all they have are “guidelines” that they can follow and they walk a thin between doing their jobs or losing their jobs. And then there are those who just don’t care anymore and although they have the rhetoric down pat, it is just repetition. Those are the ones that I imagine spend class time showing films like Cyberbully. After all, it has such a happy ending.
