WASHINGTON — In waves throughout the school year, counselor Julia Taylor has found herself consoling students who have been taunted — often anonymously — on the social networking site Formspring.me. “We say this happens outside of school,” said Taylor, of Apex High School in Raleigh, N.C. “If they’re in my office and they’re upset about it, it’s affecting school.”

The site’s creators took the popularity of online quizzes and created an entire social network devoted to asking questions, with the premise of getting to know one’s friends better, Formspring spokeswoman Sarahjane Sacchetti said. Created in November 2009, the site has attracted 23 million users, about a third of them ages 13 to 17, who generate about 10 million posts a day.

But some teenagers have taken advantage of Formspring’s anonymous features to insult and harass people in ways they might not do in person. As a result, Formspring has become the newest battleground for school administrators and guidance counselors like Taylor who already feel they are losing the war against cyberbullying — and who are under greater pressure to address situations that begin off campus but end up affecting students at school.

“It’s the online version of truth or dare — without the dare,” Taylor said.

An individual’s Formspring page is simply a string of answers to questions, which may come from a friend or from someone they’ve never met. What makes the site different from some other social networks is that users can post questions without revealing their identities.

An individual profile reads like an interview. The user can choose which questions to respond to, and those questions are private until they are answered. Users can also choose whether to accept questions from people who hide their names.

“Some of the teens were misusing the hide-my-name functionality, thinking they could say anything to each other,” Sacchetti said. Some have been labeled gay by their tormentors. Others have been called ugly, fat, stupid or worse. They have been told to die, or to kill themselves. The mother of a Canadian teen said taunts on Formspring, including at least one that suggested the girl kill herself, contributed to her 15-year-old daughter’s suicide in January.

‘Where the action is’

Even if students have been burned, they often don’t have the willpower to disconnect from the website that was the source of the insults.

“It’s the reality TV fad: You want to be where the action is,” said Justin Patchin, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, whose research focuses on how adolescents use technology and one of the co-founders of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “I’ve heard other students tell me they feel it’s safer to be on these sites with their bullies. They can see what they’re saying about them and maybe win them over. From the logic of a teenager, it makes sense.”

The challenge for educators is that Formspring’s growing popularity comes as federal officials ratchet up pressure on school officials to address bullying of all kinds among students.

Late last year, the U.S. Department of Education sent school districts letters that said the districts could be violating students’ civil rights if they don’t address bullying they know about, or reasonably should have known about.

Civil rights, tolerance

The Education Department expounded on that directive this month in a letter to the National School Boards Association, which had asked, among other things, how schools can address online harassment that begins off campus. In its response, the Education Department said the objective isn’t always discipline — which could violate a student’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Schools can instead counsel both the victim and the aggressor, have schoolwide discussions about appropriate behavior online, and teach students about civil rights and tolerance, the response said.

“I think that the whole confusion over whether or not schools get involved has to do with the unresolved question of when a school is able to discipline a child for off-campus speech,” said Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridge- water State University.

“There are many, many things (schools) can do besides disciplining the cyberbully. They need to be involved in the education issue. Their responsibility is to help children who are being traumatized and educate children who are engaging in risky behavior.”