Kalyani Mathur always got along well with her students. Young and attractive, she spent time with them in the canteen and the library of their south Mumbai school between classes. Then, one day six months ago, she found that her picture was up on the Internet.

“It had been posted on Facebook along with a sexual remark. The post was shared and went viral. A few weeks later, it was discovered that this was the handiwork of a student,” Mathur, 25, says.

The issue was referred to the cyber crime cell of the Mumbai police. The student was let off with a warning, but Mathur could not return to school where she taught history. “I lost faith in the student-teacher relationship after the incident,” she says.

Cyber bullying is not new. What’s new, though, is that it’s no longer merely about students. Now teachers are often the subject of cyber abuse. Students are putting up posts about their teachers, vilifying them, making sexual comments and passing hate remarks.

Suhasini Ram, a 26-year-old Delhi teacher, knows that. Eight months ago, she discovered that a “hate” page had been created on her on a social networking site. “Abusers called me names. There were comments about my snub nose, remarks about my single marital status. Someone wrote, ‘no matter how much you try, you will never be able find a husband,’” Ram says.

Teachers have often been the butt of student jokes. But earlier, these stayed confined to classrooms. Now, thanks to the reach of the Internet, which most urban students have access to, comments spread in no time.

The attack takes many forms. Students create hate pages or fake profiles of teachers. Hate notes or comments are shared among students on sites. Some students tweet about their teachers’ bad teaching skills or dressing styles.

“I have come across a couple of cases where students have morphed pictures of their teachers and posted them on Facebook with sensational captions,” says Mumbai-based child psychiatrist Kersi Chavda, who comes across at least 10 cases of cyber bullying of teachers in a month.

For students, this is more than a game. Some hold that this is how they can teach their teachers a lesson. “Often, teachers abuse us in front of the entire classroom or even in the school assembly,” says Nidhi Jacob, a student of a south Delhi school.

“Cyber bullying is a way of making them realise that it is really humiliating to be targeted in public. Unless we behave in a similar fashion, they will never know that their method of punishing us is wrong,” says Jacob, who once created a hate page for her English teacher who’d reprimanded her in class.

Students enjoy the anonymity of the virtual world while hitting out at teachers. “Most of these posts targeting teachers are done anonymously or with fake names and there is no easy mechanism to trace the culprit,” says Malini Bhagat, former principal of Calcutta’s Mahadevi Birla Girls’ Higher Secondary School.

Being tech savvy, the students are also always one up on the teachers, many of who have little knowledge of modern technology. A west Delhi school principal reveals that some students hacked into a teacher’s email account and deleted his work from the school’s online blackboard. They wanted to harass him simply because they didn’t like him.

“We got to know of this only after the students themselves confessed to the school counsellor,” the principal says.

Ram realised that students of her school were behind the hate page when she found remarks alluding to school affairs on it. “One morning, I tripped on the school stairs. By the evening, there were posts on that. Another day, when I had a sore throat, there were comments on my hoarse voice. But all comments were made anonymously, so I couldn’t identify the abusers,” says Ram, who discovered the posts accidentally through one of her students.

But students feel that some teachers have to be attacked. “We target mostly the ‘bad’ teachers, who are too authoritative or rude or have bad teaching skills. We cannot criticise them to their face, so social forums are our platform,” Delhi student Suraj Jain argues.

Sometimes — as in the case of Mathur — the comments by the students are sexual in nature. The attack on her had been spearheaded by a student who had developed a crush on her. “I knew he had a crush on me but I never encouraged him or allowed him to cross the line. He confessed to the cops that he wanted to teach me a lesson for that,” Mathur says.

The effects of such abuse often adversely affect the teachers. A sports teacher at a central Delhi school went into depression after one of his students created a fake profile page in his name on Facebook and listed “sex with under-age boys and girls” as one of his interests. “Friend requests were sent to some of his students through this fake profile page. When he came to know about it, he went into depression for three months and then sought a transfer to another branch of the school,” Delhi-based counsellor Etisheree Bhati reveals.

Teachers rue that students are picking up the trend from the West, where cyber bullying of teachers has been growing. According to a 2011 survey conducted by Plymouth University in Britain, over one-third of teachers surveyed said they had been subjected to online abuse. Much of the abuse was via chat on social networks. The study also found that many students were setting up Facebook groups specifically to abuse teachers.

Many in India see it as a “disturbing trend” in a country which has nurtured the guru-shishya parampara — the tradition of the teacher-pupil relationship. Over the years, the relationship between teachers and students has changed — the former is no longer a strict, cane-wielding elder, but often a sympathetic friend. And educationists rue that while the lines between teachers and students have got blurred, so have some disciplinary norms.

“Is it okay to ‘friend’ students on Facebook is the obvious question that teachers ask these days. I would advise teachers to be friendly with students but not be friends with them,” Lata Vaidyanathan of Delhi’s Modern School, Barakhamba Road, says.

And how are the students to be curbed?

“Schools need clear policies to deal with cyber bullying. Pupils should face appropriate punishment if they engage in any form of bullying — cyber or otherwise,” Vaidyanathan asserts.

(Some names have been changed to protect identities)