I know we’ve all heard this topic over and over again but it’s really becoming extremely dangerous. We’ve all seen scenerios on TV where a cyberbullying case turned deadly. The issue is young teens feel they can do or say anything on the internet without consequences and they simply cannot visibly “see” the hurt look or tears coming down the victim’s face. A friend of mine who I lost touch with in college is a victim of cyberbullying. There is a college gossip website out there (pretty immature, I know) that targets specific people according to what college they’re in. People at her college started a thread about how “overweight” she was. I put overweight in quotes because this girl was NOT heavy, she was average weight for her height and had an athletic build that girl’s always were jealous of. People simply just started this thread to be mean since there was no type of truth behind it but what they said was vicious and extremely detailed words that could have a huge negative impact on someone. Two years later, this girl has dropped 20 pounds or more and looks very frail and almost sickly. Clearly what these people wrote about her hit her deeply and she felt the need to lose weight. Maybe she was already a little insecure about it and this just took her over the edge. It is crazy to see what WORDS online can do to a person. We have heard so many stories of people being seriously impacted, due to bullying. This behavior needs to be stopped. Instead of children just getting bullied at school (which is bad enough) they now cannot escape it even at home. It is sad that we still don’t have a mandatory anti-bullying class in every school and parents need to be more aware of what their children and teens are doing online.
I can agree with your post and also relate. One of the downfalls of social networking sites it’s that people suddenly “grow balls” excuse (my language) and can say things they wouldn’t say in real life. I have also had a friend who in high school had a group on FaceBook made about her, in the group all kids from FaceBook liked the title of it, which was “Stephs too cool for school” there were also nasty posts about people talking about her outfits, sex life and body, very detrimental to somebody emotions. I have actually posted not long ago about my niece who is a victim of cyber bullying, she is only 12 years old and I read her FaceBook and just cringe. 12 year old children making comments like “nobody likes you, your ugly, go shave your eye brows, get a life, you smelled today” just mean things that can alter a child’s thoughts behaviors and emotions. She now hates school and doesn’t want to go back, gee I wonder why. Personally 12 is too young to have a FaceBook, but these days it’s common. Downfalls of the cyber world. And I agree, parents can monitor this kind of behaviors especially online, they need to realize that the internet can be a dangerous and inappropriate things for children, maybe the Television should address these kinds of issues more often.
ReplyDelete