Every year when school begins, special efforts are made to keep kids safe from bullying.

In the past, schools have focused on face-to-face problems like teasing, taunting and even physical violence.

Today, students, parents and school leaders are facing another problem that is harder to fight: Bullying, taunting and verbal abuse through electronic devices and the Internet.

Cell phones, iPhones, laptops and home computers have given kids ways to communicate that their parents never had — and they are using them constantly.

A lot of this communication is good: keeping in touch, building relationships and learning electronic skills that will help kids when they go on to college or get jobs.

Increasingly, however, text messages, instant messages, blogs and social Web sites like MySpace, are being used to embarrass, taunt, threaten or harass other students.

The problem has grown so big that the nation’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which monitors health and social problems, has just begun a program to help students, parents and schools push back against what it calls “electronic aggression.”

As many as one of every three adolescents may now be victims of electronic aggression each year, according to studies by the CDC and the Journal of Adolescent Health, and the rate of Internet harassment doubled in just five years from 2000 to 2005.

“Increasing numbers of teens and pre-teens are becoming victims of this new form of violence,” the CDC declares. And “as technology becomes more affordable and sophisticated, rates of electronic aggression are likely to … increase.”

Electronic aggression is a bigger problem than what used to be called “cyberbullying” on the Internet, because it’s more than an Internet issue.

It includes “any kind of aggression perpetrated through technology,” the CDC says, “… any type of harassment or bullying … that occurs through email, a chat room, instant messaging, a Web site, blogs or text messaging.”

More than 80 percent of adolescents now have the tools for electronic aggression through cell phones, iPhones, Blackberries or Internet access, according to studies conducted by the Journal of Adolescent Health.

One of the biggest problems with electronic bullying is that people don’t have to use their real names.

As many as 46 percent of electronic bullying victims don’t know who is targeting them because messages are sent under false names, or with no name at all, the CDC reports. Even more disturbing, 22 percent of kids who bully others electronically say they don’t know the identity of their target.

Hiding behind false names, kids feel free to be meaner and nastier in electronic communications than they would ever be face to face or over the phone, where their victims could identify them.

As a result, “in the electronic world a victim is often alone when responding to aggressive emails or text messages,” the CDC says. “His or her only defense may be to turn off the computer or cell phone.”