After reading the article on “The Rise of Cyber Bullying”, I felt both sad and pitiful for the victims. There has been a rising in the number of victims being cyber bullied and I think there must be a stop to it. However the number of victims has yet decreased. Worst still, many people, involving students, have done something similar to what a cyber bully might have done and they did not seem to have realized. This is terrible. This shows that many people do not know what cyber bullying is.
Firstly, what exactly is cyber bullying? I think cyber bullying happens when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, or mobile phones but it is usually from emails, chat rooms and even other websites from Internet. Cyber bullying is usually not a one time communication, unless it involves a death threat or a credible threat of serious bodily harm. When schools try and get involved by disciplining the student for cyber bullying actions, they often lose. Teachers just teach the students during assembly and just leave the case. They did not get opinions from students or check if they know and understand what cyber bullying is.
Secondly, how does cyber bullying works? There are two kinds of cyber bullying: direct attacks and cyber bullying by proxy. Direct attacks means messages sent to your kids directly and attack people, students. Cyber bullying by proxy means using others to help cyber bully the victim, either with or without the accomplice's knowledge. Direct attacks involves instant messaging or text messaging harassment, stealing passwords, blogs, impersonation, web sites, and sending pictures through E-mail and cell phones. They may send hateful or threatening messages to other people, without realizing that while not said in real life, unkind or threatening messages are hurtful and very serious. Blogs are online journals. They are a fun way for kids and teens to messages for all of their friends to see. However, kids sometimes use these blogs to damage other kids' reputations or invade their privacy.
For example, in one case, a boy posted a bunch of blogs about his breakup with his ex-girlfriend, explaining how she destroyed his life, calling her degrading names. Their mutual friends read about this and criticized her. She was embarrassed and hurt all because another kid posted mean, private, and false information about her. Sometimes kids set up a blog or profile page pretending to be their victim and saying things designed to humiliate them. Cyber bullying by proxy is when a cyber bully gets someone else to do their dirty work. Most of the time they are unwitting accomplices and don't know that they are being used by the cyber bully. Cyber bullying by proxy is the most dangerous kind of cyber bullying because it often gets adults involve in the harassment and people who don't know they are dealing with a kid or someone they know.
Why do people cyber bullies? I think there are many reasons to it. The first reason is perhaps because when it comes to cyber bullying, they are often motivated by anger, revenge or frustration. Sometimes they do it for entertainment or because they are bored and have too much time on their hands and too many tech toys available to them. Many do it for laughs or to get a reaction. Some do it by accident, and either sends a message to the wrong recipient or didn't think before they did something. The most dangerous reason is the bullies they themselves do not know that they are in the wrong.
The types and methods of cyber bully differ and their motives differ too, the solutions and responses to each type of cyber bullying incident has to differ too. Nonetheless, educating the kids about the consequences helps. Teaching them to respect others and to take a stand against bullying of all kinds helps too. Parents need to be the one trusted place cyber bullies can go when things go wrong online and offline. Yet they often are the one place cyber bullies avoid when things go wrong online. Why? Parents tend to overreact. Most children will avoid telling their parents about a cyber bullying incident fearing they will only make things worse. However, some parents are kept unknown about their child’s acts as most parents are working parents, which means they work and the time spend with their children is getting lesser and lesser.
It is more and more difficult to prevent cyber bullying as the internet is getting more and more important to people regardless working adults or students. Many bullies tend to think it is funny to bully people but I do not think so.
As referred in the article, Ryan Halligan was taunted for months. His classmates spread rumours via instant messaging that he is a gay. A popular female classmates pretended to like him and chatted with him online. Being unable to cope, he killed himself. I think it is foolish of him to commit suicide. There are many victims like him, who cannot cope the taunts from cyber bullies and also nobody to confide in and eventually commit suicide. I think parents plays an important job in helping their children. Besides, victims of cyber bully must also confide their problems to someone who they can trust like teachers, friends and their parents. After reading this article, it was then I knew that there are cyber bullying going on. I reckon that no one should trust anyone in the internet and more time should be spend on ones studies and not on the internet.
Together, I think we can decrease the number of cyber bullying.
*o* Heng Hui Zhi (8) ~o~
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