Cyber-Bullying: How Did We Get Here?

Cyber-bullying: How did we get here?

95% of young internet users have witnessed cyber-bullying with 1 in 3 of these young people having experienced it themselves. Unfortunately, these statistics may not even shock you. As a young person who has grown up with the internet by her side, I have seen startling amounts of cyber-bullying taking place on the internet, and social networking sites are rife with it. In recent years the term cyber-bullying has been thrown around increasingly, in particular since the introduction of instant messaging. But what constitutes cyber-bullying and how did we get to the point where more and more young people are taking their own lives as a result of this new form of bullying.

So what exactly constitutes cyber-bullying?

Cyber-bullying is any form of bullying which takes places using electronic technology, most notably, mobile phones and the internet although these are not exclusive. It can take numerous forms stretching from outright threats of violence to posting harmful pictures of a person taken with or without their knowledge for the internet to see.

One of the most common forms of cyber-bullying is harassment but impersonation is a form of bullying which is becoming increasingly popular amongst young teens. In regard to cyber-bullying, impersonation is when one person pretends to be another online and subsequently posts statuses or photos under their name which are often damaging to the victim.

How did we get here?
People have been victims of bullying since the beginning of time but this latest, often anonymous take on bullying is something much more sinister.
One of the first cases of known cyber-bullying is that of Megan Meier, a young American girl who killed herself in 2006 after a 50-year old woman pretended to be a boy online and befriended Megan. And, devastatingly the numbers of teenage suicides as a result of cyber-bullying are only increasing as the internet becomes a larger and larger part of our daily lives. And what is even more heartbreaking is the fact that it is becoming less and less of shock when we pick up a newspaper and see that yet another young person has felt the need to take their own lives.

Many people feel that social networks are to blame, attributing the cause of the bullying to websites such as Tumblr, a blogging platform and Ask.Fm, a website where people can ask others questions anonymously. Sadly the introduction of 'ask boxes' on both these websites have been contaminated with threats, slurs and urges for people to "go kill themselves".

More recently, an aspect of cyber-bullying which has come to the attention of the public is the release of pictures intended for one person's viewing and more often than not these images are either of a sexual nature or personal photographs at the very least, obviously intended for no one's eyes but the recipient. This new aspect of cyber-bullying involves placing the photograph in the most incriminating place that the recipient, or whoever gets their hands on the photo, can find. Disgustingly this 'trend' is only becoming more and more popular with Facebook sites with names such as 'Name and Shame' or 'Slut-Shaming' sites.

Personally, I feel that what is currently lacking in most people's views of cyber-bullying is the severity of it. You only have to google the phrase “cyber-bullying” to see numerous comments suggesting that few people think of cyber-bullying as an actual form of bullying and they cannot see the damage that it can cause, attributing the various cases of suicide to people who already have mental issues and telling those who are victims of it to just turn off the computer or not visit sites such as Ask.Fm. However, for young people these days stepping away from the internet just isn't an option. People who are currently teenagers have grown up with the internet and they don't know a life without it, and what's more is that they understand the repercussions of not visiting such sites which leaves them in a catch-22 situation: frequent the sites and remain a victim of cyber-bullying or leave sites alone such as Facebook and Tumblr and become ostracised by their peers.

Unfortunately, with the instant access that most people have to the internet, cyber-bullying is becoming increasingly active, and in the last few years it has rocketed from the odd mean comment on a photo that someone has posted to a social network, to methods of bullying which are driving people to commit suicide.

To draw a conclusion to the question of how we have come to the point of despair which many young people seem to be at nowadays, it seems to safe to say that our internet-obsessed generation has only fuelled these problems. For the majority of teenagers these days it is not an option to abandon social networking sites however real or however much harm the bullying is causing them. And, neither will parental blocks escape cyber-bullying as it is impossible to avoid usage of the internet as it is always accessible in some form or another. Finally, cyber-bullying is a real form of bullying which should be handled with as much care as physical bullying and to keep in mind the statistic that I quoted above that 95 % of young online users have witnessed cyber-bullying, a figure which must be brought down in order to save the lives of numerous teens.