Cyberbullying
Oct. 22nd, 2009 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easy"Anyone in the world could read this stuff. Anyone in the school could say, 'Wow, look, that's Molly Reddington. Look at what kind of person she is.' They could judge me by what other people wrote about me."
- Boston Globe, Internet bullying hits home for teen, 30 June 2005
As I've mentioned in the past, my own experience of cyberbullying has been comparatively minor, and I don't think of it as "bullying" when I have a heated exchange with another person online. A news item from 2007 discussing the differing results of US studies into cyberbullying touches on this point - that "brief encounters", as one researcher put it, should be distinguished from "recurring harassment". (There's an obvious comparison here between a one-off fight between a couple and the ongoing terror of domestic violence, or a single after-hours proposition and a campaign of sexual harassment.)
My school experience was of continual, unpredictable, unavoidable verbal aggression. But online, it's all too easy to shut harassers out. (I've just tweaked my email filter so that it eats notifications of anonymous lj comments without my knowing anything about it.) Unable to directly reach their targets, cyberbullies turn to the more indirect methods of social exclusion and malicious gossip, with the excuse that their target deserves the bullying and is a "drama llama" if they don't meekly accept it. Far from being normal and harmless, though, bullying damages lives. In some cases, it helps end them.
ETA: Teenage girl is first to be jailed for bullying on Facebook (Guardian, 21 August 2009). It's an extreme case, the culmination of years of threats and actual violence, so it isn't necessarily a turning point. That said, read the bit where the bully lies about how and when she posted the threat - only to be confronted with the Internet records. Mmm, schadenfreude.
- Boston Globe, Internet bullying hits home for teen, 30 June 2005
As I've mentioned in the past, my own experience of cyberbullying has been comparatively minor, and I don't think of it as "bullying" when I have a heated exchange with another person online. A news item from 2007 discussing the differing results of US studies into cyberbullying touches on this point - that "brief encounters", as one researcher put it, should be distinguished from "recurring harassment". (There's an obvious comparison here between a one-off fight between a couple and the ongoing terror of domestic violence, or a single after-hours proposition and a campaign of sexual harassment.)
My school experience was of continual, unpredictable, unavoidable verbal aggression. But online, it's all too easy to shut harassers out. (I've just tweaked my email filter so that it eats notifications of anonymous lj comments without my knowing anything about it.) Unable to directly reach their targets, cyberbullies turn to the more indirect methods of social exclusion and malicious gossip, with the excuse that their target deserves the bullying and is a "drama llama" if they don't meekly accept it. Far from being normal and harmless, though, bullying damages lives. In some cases, it helps end them.
ETA: Teenage girl is first to be jailed for bullying on Facebook (Guardian, 21 August 2009). It's an extreme case, the culmination of years of threats and actual violence, so it isn't necessarily a turning point. That said, read the bit where the bully lies about how and when she posted the threat - only to be confronted with the Internet records. Mmm, schadenfreude.
