To prevent your children from becoming victims of cyber bulling you have to start with explaining all the dangers that he/she could meet in the net. You should teach your child that the good manners are important not only in the real life. That way you could prevent your child from becoming accidental victim, of a bully by answering to a “flame” (link) for example, or by getting into a mean argument with potential bully.

Next thing, we advise you to do is to install filtering software on your home computer. With the help of this type of programs, you can easy block the person that is trying to bully your child online, and stop the harassment. If the bull is stubborn and keeps sending massages from different e-mails don’t let your child open e-mails form strangers, or choose an e-mail client program, that has the option to allow receiving messages only from people included in the contact list.

Although it is a bad idea to let you child read e-mails form the bully, if the harassment doesn’t stop it might be useful for you to read them. From them you can get information how fare the things have gone, and in case the e-mails contain real threats, you can keep them for later use as basis for legal actions. If the threats sound real to you, you should also inform the police.

It is extremely important to know if your child and the bully have met in person, and how well they know each other. On this are based your future actions.

If your child hasn’t met the bully in person, it is very important to prevent this from happening. You should tell your child not to give any personal details like home address, the name of the school he/she goes to, phone number, or anything else that can help the bully find you child outside the Internet. Although it happens rarely, sometimes the bullies are so mean, or angry, that they try to find the victim and turn the cyber bulling into real harassment.

If the bully and your child have met in person, and know each other, you have to talk to your child and make him tell you who the bully is. After you know his personality, you can try contacting his parents. Sometimes the parents don’t know what their child is doing while on the Internet. If you inform them about their son’s or daughter’s activities they probably will help you solve the problem, and take the necessary measures for the harassment to stop. Usually this is enough, but sometimes the parents don’t want to believe that their child is capable of doing such thing, so maybe you have to convince them. Here may help you all kinds of things that can prove the bully’s identity, like e-mails coming from the bully’s personal account, messages sent from his cell phone, or any other information that can identify the child as the bully.

In more serious cases the bully creates internet page, on which he publishes pictures or insulting comments about the victim and his/her family. Sometimes the victims don’t even know about their existence. The worst thing about these sites is that they can stay for years on the internet for everyone to see. In this case, of you can’t straighten the things directly with the bully or his parents you can turn to the company that is hosting the internet page, with a request to remove it. Usually the hosting companies as well as the internet providers sign agreements for good practices, so it shouldn’t be a problem have the internet site removed.

And last, but not least you should know that not always your child will be willing to share his/her troubles with you. Your child might have been a victim of cyber bulling for months and even years before you find out about that. In order to prevent that, you have to be prepared, and to expect that the changes in the mood of your child, his/her isolation from classmates and friends, and many other types of strange behavior might be a result of cyber bulling. You should know your child well and keep a good connection with him, so you can be aware when something’s going on.