Essay on Cyberbullying: Bullying and Online Chat Rooms

Submitted By babybabbby
Words: 2146
Pages: 9

Sherri McGill
Professor Russo
English 101
5/1/13
The Worst Type of Bullying
Cyber bullying is rapidly becoming a huge problem with young teens and young adults. Technological devices are enabling people to attack others, saying whatever they please through cyberspace. Ways people get ridiculed and belittled are through text messaging, online chat rooms, and online social networking sites. Since this form of bullying is done through technology, it cancels the face to face confrontation and attacks a person further, emotionally rather than physically. Although traditional bullying can be harmful to a person, the fact is cyber bullying is worse than physical bullying because it allows a person to insult another person at any time, causes emotional and psychological issues and can cause a person to take their own life.
Cyber-bullying, as oppose to traditional bullying, uses technology and social networks to harass, humiliate, or threaten someone. “The most common ways of cyber bullying consists of sending insulting emails, texts, or instant messages to another person using a cell phone, computer or any other communicating devices” (Jacobs 2). These devices open up a new way for people’s characters to be ruined. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Formspring are websites that enable one person to insult another person and potentially ruin their reputation. In some cases, teen suicide results from online harassment.
In one well known case, 13-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide in 2006, at least partially because of online harassment. Meier was befriended by a boy named Josh Evans on the popular social networking site MySpace. After a period of time, Evans turned on Meier and began insulting her online. Other teens on MySpace joined in with insults of their own, and a short time later Megan hanged herself with a belt in her bedroom. In a surprising twist it was later discovered that Josh Evans did not actually exist. His profile was created by the mother of a teenage neighbor of Meier to find out what Meier was saying about her daughter. (Colt 2)
The results of this case show how people will hide behind their computer and do what they can to either get information about someone and hurt them with what they know, or even to just insult them because everyone else is doing it. In “Beyond the Basics” Victoria A. Brownworth states that, “many girls are bullied online and just suffer through it, afraid to tell anyone for fear the bullying will get worse” (65). Since traditional bullying usually happens at school or another place away from home, cyber bullying is different in that, the victim will continuously be harassed through electronic devices wherever the victim is.
Traditional bullying harms a person physically rather than emotionally like cyber bullying does and the bullies bully another person for many different reasons. The children who are the bullies “may be emotionally immature and insecure, and they may lack social skills and the ability to take responsibility for their actions” (Than 1-2). The children who are the bullies often come from broken families and have not had a good role model for them to look up to. These children who fall victim of bullying, are able to escape their bully when they arrive home. Reports from WebMD.com have said that children’s absents begin to dramatically rise when they are being bullied. The victim will also begin to feel physically ill; the victim does this to avoid school and their bully. Since regular bullying is more physical, the victim is threatened by violence and the thought of complete embarrassment in an unrestricted setting. There are many different categories within traditional bullying. Some ways people get bullied are through initiation rituals, otherwise known as hazing. This is most commonly seen in sports teams. Most people can agree that an element of bullying is because of “repeated exposure to intentional injury or