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49 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1669 (2012)
Schools, Cyberbullies, and the Surveillance State

handle is hein.journals/amcrimlr49 and id is 1709 raw text is: ARTICLES SCHOOLS, CYBERBULLIES, AND THE SURVEILLANCE STATE Deborah Ahrens* ABSTRACT In recent years, parents, educators, and the media have expressed a rising concern about the prevalence of bullying in American schools. In particular this concern has been brought to the forefront with the emergence of cyberbullying and sexting. In response to this perceived epidemic of poor student behavior, legislatures and school officials have adopted a variety of new laws and search policies. Most notably, they have adopted policies giving school officials the authority to search students' electronic communication devices. This Article narrates these developments, assesses their impact on the lives of students and the culture of our schools and then locates them in broader trends in schooling, parenting, and policing. More specifically, this Article explores the degree to which our sharp spike in concern over traditional bullying, cyberbullying, and sexting, and our resort to the surveillance of student devices as a response to such a concern, reflects important lessons about our collective conception of student privacy, about the expectations parents have of the role the school will play in their children's lives, and about the transformation of public schools into public institutions focused on criminal law and criminal-law-like approaches to per- ceived social problems. When analyzed in cultural context, our schools' initial response to concerns about cyberbullying and sexting is disquieting. Though understandable-indeed even predictable-the approaches Americans have thus far chosen do not reflect considered policy supported by empirical evidence, but, rather, one more step in the reorientation of American institutions generally, and public schools specifically, towards the reflexive adoption of surveillance and punishment as the response to any potentially serious problem. * Assistant Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law. BA, Brown University; JD, New York University School of Law; MPP, Harvard University. This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in June of 2011. I would like to thank the commenters and co-panelists at that session; the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law for their feedback during their 2011-12 Faculty Speakers Series; Robert Chang, for his review of this Article; my research assistants, Carrie Hobbs, Maria Leininger, and Brian Fisher, for their many hours of capable work; and Christine Frausto, for alerting me to many of the developments described in this Article. 0 2013, Deborah Ahrens. 1669

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