Cyber Bullying

Q1. What is Cyber Bullying?

Cyberbullying is bullying that takes place over digital devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets. ...Cyberbullying includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else.

Q2. What are the methods used?

Manuals to educate the public, teachers and parents summarize, "Cyberbullying is being cruel to others by sending or posting harmful material using a cell phone or the internet." Research, legislation and education in the field are ongoing. Research has identified basic definitions and guidelines to help recognize and cope with what is regarded as abuse of electronic communications.

• Cyberbullying involves repeated behavior with intent to harm.
• Cyberbullying is perpetrated through harassment, cyberstalking, denigration (sending or posting cruel rumors and falsehoods to damage reputation and friendships), impersonation, and exclusion (intentionally and cruelly excluding someone from an online group)^[3]

Cyberbullying can be as simple as continuing to send emails or text messages harassing someone who has said they want no further contact with the sender. It may also include public actions such as repeated threats, sexual remarks, pejorative labels (i.e., hate speech) or defamatory false accusations, ganging up on a victim by making the person the subject of ridicule in online forums, hacking into or vandalizing sites about a person, and posting false statements as fact aimed a discrediting or humiliating a targeted person.^[20] Cyberbullying could be limited to posting rumors about a person on the internet with the intention of bringing about hatred in others' minds or convincing others to dislike or participate in online denigration of a target. It may go to the extent of personally identifying victims of crime and publishing materials severely defaming or humiliating them.^[2]

Cyberbullies may disclose victims' personal data (e.g. real name, home address, or workplace/schools) at websites or forums or may use impersonation, creating fake accounts, comments or sites posing as their target for the purpose of publishing material in their name that defames, discredits or ridicules them. This can leave the cyberbully anonymous which can make it difficult for the offender to be caught or punished for their behavior, although not all cyberbullies maintain their anonymity. Text or instant messages and emails between friends can also constitute cyberbullying if what is said or displayed is hurtful to the participants.

Cyberbullying by email from a fictional friend@hotmail.com

The recent use of mobile applications and rise of smartphones have yielded to a more accessible form of cyberbullying. It is expected that cyberbullying via these platforms will be associated with bullying via mobile phones to a greater extent than exclusively through other more stationary internet platforms. In addition, the combination of cameras and Internet access and the instant availability of these modern smartphone technologies yield themselves to specific types of cyberbullying not found in other platforms. It is likely that those cyberbullied via mobile devices will experience a wider range of cyberbullying types than those exclusively bullied elsewhere.^[21]

While most cases are considered to be cyberbullying, some teens argue that most events are simply drama. For example, Danah Boyd writes, "teens regularly used that word [drama] to describe various forms of interpersonal conflict that ranged from insignificant joking around to serious jealousy-driven relational aggression. Whereas adults might have labeled many of these practices as bullying, teens saw them as drama.

In social media

Cyberbullying can take place on social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. "By 2008, 93% of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 were online. In fact, youth spend more time with media than any single other activity besides sleeping.The last decade has witnessed a surge of cyberbullying, bullying that occurs through the use of electronic communication technologies, such as e-mail, instant messaging, social media, online gaming, or through digital messages or images sent to a cellular phone.^[24]

There are many risks attached to social media sites, and cyberbullying is one of the larger risks. One million children were harassed, threatened or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying on Facebook during the past year, while 90 percent of social-media-using teens who have witnessed online cruelty say they have ignored mean behavior on social media, and 35 percent have done this frequently. 95 percent of social-media-using teens who have witnessed cruel behavior on social networking sites say they have seen others ignoring the mean behavior, and 55 percent witness this frequently.^[25]

According to a 2013 Pew Research study, eight out of ten teens who use social media share more information about themselves than they have in the past. This includes location, images, and contact information. In order to protect children, it is important that personal information such as age, birthday, school/church, phone number, etc. be kept confidential.

Two studies from 2014 found that 80% of body shaming tweets are sent by women, while they also accounted for 50% of misogynistic tweets.

Cyberbullying can also take place through the use of websites belonging to certain groups to effectively request the targeting of another individual or group. An example of this is the bullying of climate scientists and activists

In gaming

Of those who reported having experienced online harassment in a Pew Research poll, 16% said the most recent incident occurred in an online game.^[13] A study from National Sun Yat-sen University observed that children who enjoyed violent video games were significantly more likely to both experience and perpetrate cyberbullying.

Another study that discusses the direct correlation between exposure to violent video games and cyber bullying also took into account personal factors such as; "duration of playing online games, alcohol consumption in the last 3 months, parents drunk in the last 3 months, anger, hostility, ADHD, and a sense of belonging"^[34] as potential contributing factors of cyberbullying.

Gaming was a more common venue for men to experience harassment, whereas women's' harassment tended to occur via social media.Most respondents considered gaming culture to be equally welcoming to both genders, though 44% thought it favored men. Keza MacDonald writes in The Guardian that sexism exists in gaming culture, but is not mainstream within it. Sexual harassment in gaming generally involves slurs directed towards women, sex role stereotyping, and overaggressive language. U.S. President Barack Obamamade reference to harassment of women gamers during remarks in honor of Women's History Month.

Competitive gaming scenes have been less welcoming of women that has broader gaming culture. In an internet-streamed fighting game competition, one female gamer forfeited a match after the coach of her team, Aris Bakhtanians, stated, "The sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community"^[41] The comments were widely condemned by gamers, with comments in support of sexual harassment "drowned out by a vocal majority of people expressing outrage, disappointment and sympathy.The incident built momentum for action to counter sexual harassment in gaming.

In a number of instances, game developers have been subjected to harassment and death threats by players upset by changes to a game or by a developer's online policies.Harassment also occurs in reaction to critics such as Jack Thompson or Anita Sarkeesian, whom some fans see as a threat to the medium. Various individuals have been harassed in connection with the Gamergate controversy. Harassment related to gaming is not of a notably different severity or tenor compared to online harassment motivated by other subcultures or advocacy issues.

Sabotage among rival crowdfunding campaigns is a recurring problem for projects related to gaming..

In search engines

Information cascades happen when users start passing on information they assume to be true, but cannot know to be true, based on information on what other users are doing. Information cascades can be accelerated by search engines' ranking technologies and their tendency to return results relevant to a user's previous interests. This type of information spreading is hard to stop. Information cascades over social media and the Internet may also be harmless, and may contain truthful information.

Bullies use Google bombs (a term applicable to any search engine)to increase the eminence of favored posts sorted by the most popular searches, done by linking to those posts from as many other web pages as possible. Examples include the campaign for the neologism "santorum" organized by the LGBT lobby. Google bombs can manipulate the Internet's search engines regardless of how authentic the pages are, but there is a way to counteract this type of manipulation as well.

Q3 What has been done to prevent it?

Law enforcement

A majority of states have laws that explicitly include electronic forms of communication within stalking or harassment laws. Most law enforcement agencies have cyber-crime units and often Internet stalking is treated with more seriousness than reports of physical stalking. Help and resources can be searched by state or area.

Schools

The safety of schools is increasingly becoming a focus of state legislative action. There was an increase in cyberbullying enacted legislation between 2006 and 2010. Initiatives and curriclulum requirements also exist in the UK (the Ofsted eSafety guidance) and Australia (Overarching Learning Outcome 13).

In 2012, a group of teenagers in New Haven, Connecticut developed an application to help fight bullying. The application is called "Back Off Bully" (BOB), the web app is an anonymous resource for computer, smart phone or iPad. When someone witnesses or is the victim of bullying, they can immediately report the incident. The app asks questions about time, location and how the bullying is happening, as well as providing positive action and empowerment over the incident, the reported information helps by going to a database where administrators study it.

Common threads are spotted so others can intervene and break the bully's pattern.Back Off Bully, the brainchild of fourteen teens in a design class, is being considered as standard operating procedure at schools across Connecticut, while recent studies carried out among 66 high school teachers have concluded that prevention programs proved ineffective to date.

Protection

There are laws that only address online harassment of children or focus on child predators as well as laws that protect adult cyberstalking victims, or victims of any age. Currently, there are 45 cyberstalking (and related) laws on the books. While some sites specialize in laws that protect victims age 18 and under, Working to Halt Online Abuse is a help resource containing a list of current and pending cyberstalking-related United States federal and state laws.It also lists those states that do not have laws yet and related laws from other countries. The Global Cyber Law Database (GCLD) aims to become the most comprehensive and authoritative source of cyber laws for all countries.

Age

Children report negative online behaviors occurring from the second grade. According to research, boys initiate negative online activity earlier than girls do. However, by middle school, girls are more likely to engage in cyberbullying than boys.^[57] Whether the bully is male or female, his or her purpose is to intentionally embarrass others, harass, intimidate, or make threats online to one another. This bullying occurs via email, text messaging, posts to blogs, and websites.

Studies in the psycho-social effects of cyberspace have begun to monitor the impacts cyber-bullying may have on the victims, and the consequences it may lead to. Consequences of cyber-bullying are multi-faceted, and affect online and offline behavior. Research on adolescents reported that changes in the victims' behavior as a result of cyber-bullying could be positive. Victims "created a cognitive pattern of bullies, which consequently helped them to recognize aggressive people.

However, the Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace abstract reports critical impacts in almost all of the respondents', taking the form of lower self-esteem, loneliness, disillusionment, and distrust of people. The more extreme impacts were self-harm. Children have killed each other and committed suicide after having been involved in a cyberbullying incident. Some cases of digital self-harm have been reported, where an individual engages in cyberbullying against themselves, or purposefully and knowingly exposes themselves to cyberbullying.

Adults

Stalking online has criminal consequences just as physical stalking. A target's understanding of why cyberstalking is happening is helpful to remedy and take protective action to restore remedy. Cyberstalking is an extension of physical stalking.^[9] Among factors that motivate stalkers are: envy, pathological obsession (professional or sexual), unemployment or failure with own job or life; intention to intimidate and cause others to feel inferior; the stalker is delusional and believes he/she "knows" the target; the stalker wants to instill fear in a person to justify his/her status; belief they can get away with it (anonymity).^[62]

The US federal cyberstalking law is designed to prosecute people for using electronic means to repeatedly harass or threaten someone online. There are resources dedicated to assisting adult victims deal with cyberbullies legally and effectively. One of the steps recommended is to record everything and contact police.