Cyberbullying is currently a burning problem in any country around the world, including the USA. This is a form of harassment, bullying through electronic means that makes the victim feel extremely scared and worried. The article will share the latest research on Cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying is a common form of cyber-violence among minors
Research on Cyberbullying – what is online bullying?
Cyberbullying (cyberbullying) is also known in English as Cyberbullying. This is one of the forms of harassment, intimidation and bullying through social platforms for the purpose of losing confidentiality, humiliation, and mental torture. This form of bullying is growing and spreading, causing many dangerous consequences.
Bullies will use offensive words, post offensive, vulgar, harassing, or boycott status lines on the online community, and even use caricature images and videos to insult and humiliate others. According to statistics, among teenagers, about 3 out of 10 children are victims of online bullying.
It is known that since 1974, the internet has appeared, but it was not until the 21st century that it really exploded and developed until now. The Internet has been greatly invested in development, contributing to the creation of a series of social networking platforms to encourage people to connect and easily connect with each other. Through these websites, you can easily search and interact with friends around the world without worrying about language, territory, or geography.
However, this great development also has many negative aspects, the most common of which is Cyberbullying . Based on the statistics of actual surveys, it is found that up to 40% of cases of minors between the ages of 8 and 17 have been or are victims of Cyberbullying.
In a survey conducted on 899 high school students in Japan conducted in 2015, 22% of students were victims of Cyberbullying and 7.8% of students admitted to being victims of cyberbullying. that I have been involved in social media violence. This was followed by a broader study of 2599 elementary school students in Kyoto that found that about 12.5% of students suffered the trauma of cyberbullying and 10.6% admitted to it. that I used to bully my friends by words and actions through social networking sites.
Surprisingly, there is also a gender difference in Cyberbullying . Experts found that the rate of female students participating in this crime was about 10.9% higher than that of male students. The results of a survey conducted in 2010 on 9 junior high schools in Nagaura Ward (Kanagawa Prefecture) and Terado Ward, Tominaga (Kyoto) found that up to 8.7% of the total 5357 students participated in the school year. online bullying against others, in which the percentage of female students accounts for the majority.
Basically, Cyberbullying is different from regular bullying. However, there are also some notable points such as:
- Victims of bullying often find it difficult to identify the target or target group of the bully or not know the reason why they do what they do.
- Victims can suffer more serious consequences than regular bullying. Also because content that is disruptive, humiliating, and defamatory to the victim will be easily spread and widely shared in many places.
- Victims can even be harassed and hacked whenever they are in contact with social networks or when checking messages, emails, calls, etc.
Basic types of cyberbullying
In fact, there are many ways to engage in cyberbullying with someone online. Some of the more obvious forms of bullying include:
- Harassment: Refers to actions such as texting or sending rude, offensive messages that are intended to offend, abuse, or be abusive. Post embarrassing or offensive comments or pictures on social media or in online video games.
- Flaming: Deliberately using offensive language to conduct debates on social media. The goal is to draw as many people into the attack as causing suffering to others.
- Denigration: Sending false, untrue and damaging information to others. It may be sharing other people’s pictures with the purpose of spreading bad news and disparaging words to ridicule.
- Impersonation: Hacking into email or social media accounts or creating pages that impersonate others to post pornographic or embarrassing material of the person being bullied.
- Outing and Trickery: Sharing personal or fraudulent information in order to get a person’s confidential information to forward to others including photos, videos, messages, etc.
- Exclusion: The act of intentionally removing someone from a message group or other groups on social networks, gaming sites, etc.
- Cyber Stalking: Refers to repeated actions such as sending messages, threatening messages, harassing to hurt someone through social networks and online channels.
Cyberbullying – What Causes It?
The advent of the Internet brought a lot of benefits to people’s lives, it made it easy for us to connect, exchange and update a lot of useful information. At the same time, the outstanding development of the internet also helps a lot for work, opening up many opportunities to make money for many people.
Along with those benefits, today’s social networking platforms also have many potential harms. In which, Cyberbullying is the most common and worthy of attention. In fact, anything that happens has a specific cause, Cyberbullying is no exception.
In general, cyber-violences are caused by unknown people, they are not afraid of being exposed, so they feel very safe when attacking and humiliating others through computer keyboards, screens. phone picture. However, it is not natural that a person spends hours attacking and opposing others.
Online bullying can happen for many different reasons
According to experts, Cyberbullying can happen for the following reasons:
1. Indirect revenge
Some people, due to pressures from everyday life, they constantly have to face stress, fatigue, hardship, or have been victims of bullying, affecting their psychology. There will be a tendency to want to take out your anger on others. They can use social media as a tool to retaliate against those who have bullied or bullied them indirectly. Also because they think their life has suffered too many negative things, they have suffered too much mentally and physically, so they want others to go through the same thing as them.
2. Not afraid of being discovered
Usually, people who conduct Cyberbullying will intentionally hide their identities, they create many virtual accounts to limit the risk of being discovered. At the same time, acts of violence online are difficult to identify the perpetrator because bad actors never use their correct information.
Therefore, the perpetrator will always feel safe because they can hardly be exposed, they can freely do what they want to satisfy their own needs. Moreover, many people also feel extremely comfortable when the victim is bewildered, afraid and always looking for the perpetrator. This sometimes also causes them to increase their excitement, constantly increasing the severity to perform acts that degrade the honor and dignity of others.
3. Due to the desire for power
Those who bully others through social networks always think that they are always right, they give themselves the right to judge, criticize and insult others. They think they have the power to judge right and wrong, or they think the victim’s self deserves to suffer such hurt.
In addition, in some other cases, online bullies have the mentality that, if they don’t do it, someone else will do the same and they give themselves the right to blatantly insult and scold others. . These subjects will feel extremely satisfied and happy when they grasp the weaknesses of others, they are happy when they see others angry, sad, hurt.
4. Desire to express yourself
Based on statistics, it is found that the majority of perpetrators of Cyberbullying are teenagers, young people. At this age, children always have the desire to become an adult, the desire to assert themselves through acts of violence and bullying others. More specifically, when their bullying behaviors are praised and praised, they will become even more complacent. At the same time, when the victims of Cyberbullying feel fear and confusion, they will feel even more excited and happy.
5. Watch it as a pastime online
Many people engage in provocative behavior but are not aware that the wrong things they are doing will hurt others. They think this is just a joke, a harmless game to find joy in their lives. Maybe because their lives are too boring, tasteless and do not receive much attention and sharing from those around them, they tend to scold others and see it as a “success” of their own.
Cyberbullying is considered by many young people as an entertainment in life
6. Due to hatred, jealousy
Online bullying behaviors sometimes stem from feelings of jealousy and envy for what others have. They often target objects with beauty, money, and high status in order to humiliate and overthrow them. Usually threatening to release hot messages, photos or blackmail.
How to detect Cyberbullying ?
Victims of Cyberbullying are often in a state of fear, confusion and severe psychological effects. However, they tend to want to hide, do not want to share with those around them because they feel extremely embarrassed, afraid of being stigmatized and shunned by people. Or the minors are afraid of letting their parents find out that their rights to use computers, phones or social networking devices will be confiscated.
Some signs for you to recognize a victim of Cyberbullying include:
- There is always a feeling of sadness, depression, or despair when using social media or this feeling will linger afterward.
- Anger, upset or panic, loss of control after seeing threatening, humiliating, abusive content online.
- Tendency to avoid, not wanting to hang out with friends and family.
- Unusual mood swings, difficulty controlling your thoughts.
- Loss of concentration, sleep disturbance, change in eating habits.
- Feeling anxious, insecure, agitated when there is a new message or email notification.
- There are many trends that do not want to continue to use the phone, computer or constantly monitor social platforms for news that is offensive or self-defeating.
- Avoid social media related discussions.
- Negative emotions constantly appear, making the victim feel tired, exhausted, stressed, and depressed.
Research on the consequences of cyberbullying
Cyberbullying is a problem that has existed for a long time, but so far it has not shown any signs of cooling down. Especially young people, young people tend to see this as an interesting “game”, a way to express themselves, in many cases even forming groups to increase the scale of violence. network.
Besides, the victims of Cyberbullying tend to want to hide and suffer alone, so this evil is difficult to overcome. In fact, the impacts of cyberbullying are enormous, it not only affects the health but also causes many obstacles to the victim’s life and daily activities.
In 2012, scientists conducted a study on Child Health – Kidshealth showing that the mental health of Cyberbullying victims is severely impacted. Victims have to endure the oppression and denial of a group of people for a long time. Along with that, they will feel lonely, sad, isolated from society and severely condemned.
Victims of cyberbullying can experience serious psychological effects
Some common consequences of Cyberbullying include:
- Emotional problems: One of the great harms that cyberbullying can do is emotional deprivation. Victims will not have a sense of security and will always feel that they are being watched and watched. Many people even fall into a state of panic, excessive anxiety. Just an alarm of a new text message, email notification, or new call also makes them excited and scared.
- Stress-related disorders: People who are victims of Cyberbullying will always feel insecure, depressed, depressed. But this subject easily falls into a state of stress, depression, loss, depression because they feel that everyone has turned against them, and the surrounding life seems to have no hope at all. Victims of cyberbullying are more likely to experience severe stress, depression, anxiety disorders, and symptoms of nervous tension such as insomnia, headaches, dizziness, etc.
- Having a lot of troubles in life: The defamatory, insulting and abusive information on social networking sites is easy to spread and affect the normal life of the victim. They may face the risk of dropping out of school, being fired from their job or having difficulty maintaining relationships.
- Suicide: When the victim has to constantly suffer and face a lot of pressure from social networks, the victim will easily form negative thoughts, the risk of committing suicide increases. In many cases to prove their purity and transparency, they decided to seek death to end all discussion. According to statistics, people who are bullied on social networks are 2 to 9 times more likely to think about death than the average person.
How to stop online bullying (Cyberbullying)
Many people often mistakenly believe that Cyberbullying is just a virtual form and does not cause too much impact on the victims. However, as shared, this form causes many dangerous consequences, the most serious being life-threatening. Moreover, victims of Cyberbullying often do not want to share about the problem they are facing, so preventing and overcoming is sometimes difficult.
However, you should understand that facing and suffering this problem on your own is not an easy thing. Therefore, if you are in this situation, you can try to refer to and apply the following effective measures:
1. Share with family and school
The first thing to do when you find yourself becoming a victim of Cyberbullying is to notify your family and school. If you are a teenager and do not have much experience in life, this is probably the most effective and safe solution.
Parents are the best spiritual support for you to be strong enough to overcome all difficulties and obstacles in life. At the same time, adults will have a lot of experience, give useful tips to help you become better, handle all situations of threats, intimidation and humiliation of others.
Children who are bullied online should share and inform their parents and relatives
At this time, parents should comfortably and gently support their children, can tell them about similar experiences of their childhood so that they understand that they are not alone. Let them understand that this is not entirely their fault and offer encouragement to help them become calmer and more settled.
At the same time, parents also need to meet with the homeroom teacher, the school principal to inform about this situation. School is the main living environment for young children, there will also be many ways to help children cope well with Cyberbullying.
At the same time, parents should also encourage their children not to overreact to threatening behavior and content online. This doesn’t make matters much better, and sometimes makes things worse. The best is to keep the evidence to easily find the clues and the culprit, solve the source of the problem well.
2. Report bad content, block accounts
In case you don’t know specifically about the subject of online bullying, it is best to block this person’s account and report badly about the content they post. Currently, on almost every device, social networking sites have features for information security, blocking distractions, limiting interactions and strict regulations to protect a healthy and civilized network environment.
Posts with content that offend, slander, insult, threaten the honor and dignity of others will be required to be edited or permanently deleted after being reported. At the same time, to avoid being abused by bad actors, you should also adjust your privacy and improve the security of the personal websites you are using.
3. Limiting access to technology and social networks
In today’s society, limiting exposure to social networks can be extremely difficult. In addition, many victims of Cyberbullying can’t resist the curiosity and temptation, but constantly visit websites to see information and posts about themselves. However, this makes them even more anxious and insecure.
Restricting access to social media is the best way to prevent cyberbullying injuries
Therefore, the best way is to limit your time in contact with social networks, set your own rules about texting and surfing the web. Currently, information websites and modern phones have many features to help control and limit internet access, so you can apply them to reduce the negative effects of Cyberbullying.
4. Report to authorities
For some cases where the perpetrators have seriously insulted or slanderous acts and words that affect the honor, work, or property damage, you can completely report them to the authorities. investigated and dealt with strictly. Before reporting, you need to collect sufficient evidence of the online bully, and provide all the necessary information about that object.
Reporting to the authorities is one of the safe ways to help you protect yourself and prevent threatening and threatening behaviors of bad actors. As soon as you notice acts or messages, false information, insults, and humiliation posted on social networking sites, you need to notify the authorities for timely intervention and handling. .
Cyberbullying , if it is not detected and intervened in time, will cause many negative effects on the psychology and daily life of the victim. Therefore, before using social networks, you also need to equip yourself with the necessary knowledge and skills to minimize possible nuisances. Hopefully through the information of this article, readers will better understand Cyberbullying and know effective prevention.
