Insults and pornographic images are the preferred form of harassment among the city-state's technology-savvy students, most of whom have Internet access at home or in highly-computerized government schools.

Singapore on Monday launched a campaign to discourage mean behavior among its students, who are already stressed out by an extremely competitive educational system which the government is now trying to reform.

"Having been to Singapore and seen how well-behaved the children are, the results came as quite a shock," Parry Aftab, executive director of New York-based Internet ethics group Wired Safety, told the Straits Times.

"Singapore has far more cases than anyone would have expected."

Wired Safety, which monitors 76 countries, said that as a proportion of the population, it has received far more reports of "cyber-bullying" from Singapore than any country outside the US, with 80 reports so far this year.

One major difference is that while Singaporean kids use x-rated pictures and crass words via email or in chat rooms to bully their peers, American kids go so far as to make death threats.

But some Singaporean kids have learned to use technology to fight schoolyard bullies.

A 15-year-old boy hacked into his tormentor's email account, changed the password to deny him access, and then sent out bogus messages from the account designed to put his enemy into trouble.

As part of a "Bully Free Week" campaign launched Monday, Singapore is harnessing the popularity of SMS text messaging by urging secondary school students to send each other the message "Be cool, be bully-free."

More than 80 percent of Singaporeans own mobile phones, one of the highest penetration rates in the world, and SMS or Short Message System communication has exploded in popularity among teenagers and even primary school children.

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