Luciana stays after hours in her room with her notebook exchanging messages with more than five hundred friends of her social network and interacting with hundreds of players of online games. She thinks virtual reality is much more interesting than the so called “real world”. But when Marcelo chooses her as a target and starts harassing her with offensive messages through the cell phone and the computer, Luciana feels awful, without knowing what to do with her unknown enemy.

The situation gets worse in school when Leonardo involves Marcelo as an author of cyberbullying to attack another classmate. The school's principal, worried about these violent episodes among students launches a campaign “Aggression is not cool”, stimulating collaboration among students, school staff and families to encourage the responsible use of the internet and inhibit the bullies' attacks.

These are the key ideas of A face oculta (The hidden face), a story of bullying and cyberbullying, that I have written to invite students and teachers to think about violent behavior in school life. Where are the borders separating kidding, harassment, aggression and relentless persecution in the behavior of children and teenagers? How to inspire them to make responsible use of the internet and the cell phone at school and at home?

Working as a lecturer all over Brazil I see how much families and teachers are worried about the way children and teenagers use the internet. On one hand, they recognize the positive contributions of these resources; on the other, there are severe risks of limiting other life experiences and potentializing violent behavior, as in cyberbullying episodes. The joint work of families and schools is essential to create a culture of non-tolerance to bullying and cyberbullying, developing a healthy relationship network in which everyone agrees that “aggression is not cool”.

The most common expressions of aggression are: humiliation, offensive nicknames, power games of the “pops” to intimidate classmates to follow their rules if they wish to be part of the group, threats or actual physical aggression, psychological violence, offensive messages. These are relentless attacks to self-esteem that, in many cases, intensify in the victim feelings of rejection, difficulty to be part of any group, fear of going to school, anxiety attacks, depression.

Bullying behavior can be defined as constant episodes of physical or verbal attacks with the clear intention to make the victim feel very bad.

Cyberbullying is even worse, because the persecution is relentless, day and night, on weekdays and weekends. The victim may be attacked by messages in the cell phone, or the computer, photos or films may be taken secretly or adulterated and then posted; the author may create a false profile of the victim with shameful information or insert false information into a photo, for example, including the girl's cell phone number as if she were a prostitute and send it to all his contact lists.

The most common characteristics of the victims are: insecure, shy children and teenagers, having difficulties to make friends; those who are very intelligent or talented, generating attacks motivated by envy and jealousy .The most common characteristics of bullies: insecure children and teenagers that have been bullied and have difficulties in relating to others on a friendly basis; lack of empathy; those who are leaders but use this ability in a negative way; those who have sociopathic tendencies who enjoy provoking suffering on others. In cyberbullying, the belief in the possibility of remaining anonymous with no consequences for the attacks, increase significantly their incidence. A large number of victims suffer in silence, for fear or shame to tell somebody they trust, and this reinforces the bully's power. The observers' role is also very important: many remain in silence for fear of becoming the next victim. Nevertheless, their actions may have the power to inhibit the bully's attacks, providing a protection network for the victims.

The daily life at school provides a number of opportunities to consolidate fundamental human values, such as having respect, solidarity, collaboration and gentleness towards others. Bullies attack their victims in the classroom, in the bathroom, in other school facilities, as well as in the schoolbus. To think that it is just a matter of “kids having fun” or that the victims “don't know how to amuse themselves” is to deny the seriousness of the problem or to fail to admit that one does not have any idea of how to deal with it. It is similar to what happened traditionally in child rearing: parents believed they had the right to spanking or being verbally aggressive to their children to educate them. Nowadays, this is unacceptable behavior characterizing domestic violence; such parents are reminded by the law that children have rights and that they need to learn how to raise their kids without violence. As far as bullying and cyberbullying are concerned, something similar is happening on a larger scale in many countries: people are becoming aware that “aggression is not cool”. Relentless persecution, insulting messages, physical or verbal aggression are not acceptable.

Schools that have engaged in successful anti-bullying programs involved the whole school team with an active partnership with students and their families to create a culture of non-tolerance to bullying and cyberbullying by setting clear limits and effective consequences to bullies attacks, empowering the victims, stimulating in bullies the positive use of their leadership abilities and the development of empathy, encouraging the effective involvement of the observers to inhibit the attacks. The results are the improvement in the quality of the relationships and the responsible use of technology.

The first step is to recognize the existence of the problem: bullying episodes occur in every school, in all social and economic layers, in a large or small scale. When the school sets clear limits in the sense of not tolerating bullying behavior, it is possible to create an agreement with clear rules to be presented to families and students. This prevents a number of episodes of aggression, although some students enjoy testing limits just to see what happens when they break the rules. So, episodes of bullying will happen and will have to be dealt with effectively. This agreement of treating others respectfully may be also made with young children who, together with their teachers elaborate some “laws of the classroom” and the consequences to be applied when these rules are broken. It is worth mentioning the experience of hundreds of schools around the world associated to UNESCO's Culture of Peace Program, training young children in conflict management, helping them to channel their natural aggressiveness in constructive and useful ways.

In some cases, parents have to be called to a private school meeting to deal with their children's problem. But, on a large number of occasions, managing the problem in the classroom or talking privately to bullies and their victims will be enough. It is essential to stimulate the bully to recognize his full responsibility for the aggression. Bullies tend to deny they are the authors of the aggression and blame others, including the victim, complaining that they have been provoked. To talk about these issues with the whole group in the classroom is quite important, especially in cases of nicknames and social exclusion revealing prejudices against minorities.

These are opportunities to deepen reflection: “And if it happened to you?”

The group conversation is also useful to stimulate the development of new resources to deal with bullying episodes, discouraging bullies to go on attacking others.