What is cyber bullying?
If you’re like most teenagers, you spend a lot of time on a cell phone or instant messenger chatting with friends and uploading photos, videos, and music to websites. You may have online friends whom you’ve never met in person, with whom you play games and exchange messages. Teens’ lives exist in a variety of places such as school hallways, part-time jobs, and friends’ houses. Now many teens also have lives on the internet. And bullying has followed teens online. Online bullying, called cyber bullying, happens when teens use the internet, cell phones, or other devices to send or post text or images intended to hurt or embarrass another person. Cyber bullying is a problem affecting almost half of all American teens. Whether you’ve been a victim of cyber bullying, know someone who has been cyber bullied, or have even cyber bullied yourself, there are steps you and your friends can take to stop cyber bullying and stay cyber-safe. How are Teens Cyber bullied? Being a victim of cyber bullyi
Cyber bullying or online bullying is a term used to refer to bullying over electronic media. Cyber bullying is willful and involves recurring or repeated harm inflicted through electronic text. Cyber bullying can be as simple as continuing to send e-mail to someone who has said they want no further contact with the sender. Cyber bullies may also include threats, “putdowns” or hate-motivated speech. Cyber bullies may publish the personal contact information of their victims. They may attempt to assume the identity of a victim for the purpose of publishing material in their name that defames or ridicules them.
Cyber bullying is a means of harassment that makes use of online tools to accomplish the purpose. The cyber bully may post embarrassing images, information, or gossip about another individual on various social networking sites as well as email, instant messaging, and message boards or forums. As with any type of bullying, the activity is aimed at undermining the confidence of the victim and creating suffering for reasons that are usually not apparent to anyone but the bully. For the most part, cyber bullying is defined as involving an adolescent or teenager as the victim. The bully is most commonly a peer to the victim, although there are instances where the instigator of the bullying is someone older. When the activity involves adults as both the victim and the bully, the behavior is more commonly referred to as cyber stalking or cyber harassment. The exact approach to cyber bullying will vary. In some instances, the bully will send a series of intimidating messages to the victim eith
Cyber bullying is bullying through email, instant messaging, in a chat room, on a Web Site, or through digital messages or images sent to a cellular phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) (Kowalski et al, 2008). Cyber bullying, like traditional bullying, involves a negative action that is often repeated, and involves an imbalance of power. With cyber bullying, an individual may have more power just by being able to instantly share negative comments or photographs with a multitude of people via email, instant messaging, text messaging, or through Web Site posts. Cyber bullying may involve several individuals targeting one individual, or a more popular student targeting a less popular classmate. Cyber bullying is a particularly insidious and devastating form of bullying: • Cyber bullying frequently happens outside the school setting and may be difficult for educators to observe. • One cyber bullying attack may have exponential exposure; one embarrassing photo or one degrading email me
