One day in October 2005, Courtney Kelley checked her e-mail and found that someone had contacted her using Facebook, the immensely popular social-networking Web site for college students. But when she went to see who had sent her the message she got an unhappy blast from the past.

"It was my horrible ex-boyfriend that I'd been broken up with for more than two years," recalls the Wheaton College senior.

Out of the blue, Kelley found herself on the receiving end of a series of taunts and insults from her old flame, which upset her long after the messages stopped.

"There's a lot of room for abuse on Facebook," Kelley says now. "It makes it easy to find anybody and communicate with them, even if the other person doesn't want communication with them."

Nonetheless, Kelley still maintains a profile on the site and admits, "I spend too much time on the Facebook." Kelley is not alone. The Internet's mix of anonymity and instantaneity is leading to cyberbullying - virtual harassment that is becoming increasingly common, particularly among young people.

Several states, including Rhode Island, are considering crackdowns to curb or outlaw the behavior.

State Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham, found himself on the receiving end of similar online attacks earlier this month. The state Senate's assistant minority whip, who represents part of Attleboro, all of North Attleboro and several towns to the north, was criticized after quoting profanity-laced Facebook postings blasting him and his eldest daughter to a high school class. Brown defended himself by pointing out that it was not he but students who had written the offending material.

Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor at Bridgewater State College, said she was not surprised by the flip.

"It's very hard for many adults - and state senators are no exception to this - to keep up with what's going on technologically with kids," she says. "This shocked him, that his daughter went through this, and I think it shocks most people. It didn't shock me at all."

Indeed, Englander, who runs the Massachusetts Aggression-Reduction Center (M.A.R.C.) at Bridgewater State, which counsels parents and students on how to deal with cyberbullying, says she has found such harassment to be "very common."

A survey the Center conducted in 2006 found that 40 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds had experienced cyberbullying during high school, and 73 percent were aware of a profile that included insulting, degrading, harassing, or threatening content.

Englander believes much of the problem stems from the "gargantuan" generation gap that exists between parents and children today regarding technology.

"This generation of parents and their children are living in different worlds," she says, "and the parents do not understand what the children are doing, and the children do not understand where the parents have come from."

"The gap is so profound and it affects so many things, and cyberbullying is just one of the manifestations of that," says Englander, who compares it to the gap that existed in 1910 between European immigrants and their Americanized children. "They love each other, but they don't understand each other." The main difference between old-fashioned bullying and cyberbulling, Englander says, is that the latter "draws children into it, both as bullies and as victims, who otherwise wouldn't be involved in bullying. There are many children who would never intimidate someone or frighten someone in person who might do it online because online it is seen as safer and more anonymous, or because they don't think it's really real online."

Marge Werner, an education professor of Wheaton College, agrees.

"I think bullying, whether by cyberspace or other avenues, is a very serious problem in our culture, especially at the middle school level," she says.

Werner says she is quite concerned by cyberbullying, and now discusses it with students in her education classes.

Indeed, part of cyberbullying's uniqueness stems from its invisibility to adults, taking place as it does online and out of sight.

Ryan Halligan, a 13-year-old Vermont boy, committed suicide in 2003 after his classmates' online taunts became too much for him to take.

"My wife and I thought we knew the risks of Internet use and thought we had done all that we could to protect" him, Ryan's father, John, later wrote in The Boston Globe. "But we were unaware that the difficulties in Ryan's middle school life had extended into the summer, then into the evenings when school started up again."

The Internet is now a fact of life, says Englander, and adults must become better educated about it and how children use it so that they can talk with their children about safe, responsible behavior online. She also thinks educators should begin to incorporate lessons on appropriate and safe cyberspace behavior into the school curriculum.

"Children are not getting any guidance whatsoever on how to use electronic resources," she says. "It would be sort of like telling 10-year-olds, we're going to let you start driving cars but we're not going to give you any instruction, then we give them the keys and (are) amazed that they're having accidents and crashing."