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Is cyberbullying as harmful as harassment?
Results so far:
| Yes | 78% | 279 votes | Total: 359 votes | |
| No | 22% | 80 votes |
Yes
by Helena Whyte
Created on: October 12, 2010 Last Updated: October 14, 2010
Yes, cyberbullying is as harmful as harassment and hazing. Recent publications regarding teen suicides support the conclusion that cyberbullying may be more harmful than harassment or hazing. Harassment leads to hostile hallways in school and in the work place. Cyberbullying makes the victim feel unsafe and insecure everywhere. Electronic bullying and stalking follow the victim home. There is nowhere to run or hide. In the last century, victims could change schools or go live with grandma if rumors or bullying interfered with normal social or emotional growth. Cyberbullying won't be stopped by changing schools or going to live with a relative in another state. Suicides have been the result of cyberbullying in children as young as nine years old.
Harassment may get the perpetrator fired or demoted. Cyberbullying may get the perpetrator jail time.
Harassment, cyberbullying and stalking are forms of emotional violence. Items on the Internet and words last forever. The hurt is not short lived; the hurt also lasts forever. Accusations that a young person is homosexual seem to be the most harmful, but isolation and shunning are also devastating to a developing teen. A recent case showed that the humiliation even continued during the funeral and after the burial. This homosexual cyberbullying should be classified as a hate crime. The victim is just as dead from the verbal text assault as from a brutal physical beating.
Electronic media allows the hateful pictures and words to spread in minutes instead of days. The pictures may not even be real since Photo Shop and other photo editing software can produce undetectable embellishments to any photo. Since it is easy for someone to assume a Facebook identity, it is difficult for the victim of cyberbullying to determine the origin of the text or photo. Then teens pass on the mean or threatening messages so the victim is victimized repeatedly and feels ganged up on. Violent video games, inappropriate rap music content, texting, and e-mails have desensitized our youth to how long lasting hurtful and demeaning comments can be. Unfortunately, many cyberbullying incidents start out as a joke and escalate. Of course the victim never thought the comments and texts were funny or that the threats were meaningless. Other rumors and hateful, spiteful photos and text messages are started by jealous girls. There have even been cases of cyberbullying started by mothers of cheerleaders and former bffs (best friends forever or until one girl gets something the other wanted).
References:
Hostile Hallways: The AAUW Survey of Sexual Harassment in America's Schools, 1993.
Drawing the Line: Sexual Harassment On Campus, AAUW Educational Foundation, 2005.
http://www.komando.com/kids/tip.aspx?id=2496.
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No
by Kollen Post
Created on: January 19, 2011
To claim that cyberbullying is as damaging as personal harassment is as absurd as claiming that watching a violent movie is the same thing as witnessing violence of equal caliber. Though some people seek to blame both of these things for societies problems, they are merely scapegoats. The whole point of the internet is detachment. Engaging with another human being on the internet is a far less personal, and therefore exponentially less moving experience. This in itself is a problem, as many people can use the internet cloister themselves away from actual meaningful interpersonal experience that allows a person to grow, but it also means that what is said on the internet will never affect a person as deeply as it would in real life.
At the age of 18 (hopefully that youth will not cause my argument to be dismissed), I have been called some pretty horrible things via the internet. I have had profanities cross-pollinated in ways I had never imagined for the sole purpose of a person attempting to insult me. And would you like to know the typical reaction from me? A raised eyebrow at my computer screen, a bemused look that might even progress to a laugh. I have had everything from my sexual orientation and genital size to my parentage to my psychological well-being called into question on the internet, yet it is meaningless because these people do not know me. They have no basis for truth or knowing whatever they claim to know. If a person said some of these things to me in real life, I would probably be offended, or at least not amused. But the internet is so impersonal as to be unaffecting.
That is not to say that cyberbullying is always this harmless. Some people take it to extremes, and some victims are emotionally vulnerable to the point at which they take such things harshly. However, I claim that any amount of effort put into cyberbullying would be much more damaging if that same effort was enacted in real life, meatspace if you will. Also, any person vulnerable to internet attacks would be even more so to any direct personal attacks from someone they actually make eye contact with. There is no way that cyberbullying can ever match real life harassment for effect. It can only hope to compete in that it allows for a bully to have a greater volume of victims.
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