Buzz Buzz people check their phones constantly hoping to be loved. But there are always those notifications that you wish you could take back from seeing. Wish somebody had seen it first, deleting it before you could have had the chance to see it. No, somehow it always gets to you, making your sunshine day into a storm.
What has this world come to? Social Networks have gone from a way to connect with your friends, and people that you cant see everyday, into a way to trash anyone who is anybody. Cyber bullying is when a teenager is “tormenting, threatening, harassing, humiliating, or just targeting” another child. It can only be done through minors or it is not considered cyber bullying. But honestly, what satisfaction does it give you; does it really make you feel better about yourself to make someone else feel like crap, to make them feel less than the world and want to maybe even eventually kill themselves? No body understands where they are coming from. The only thing that this world knows is that cyber bullying has got to come to an end.
In addition, stopcyberbullying.org states, “there are two kinds of cyber bullying, direct attacks, and cyber bullying by proxy”. Direct attacks are when the messages are sent directly to the kids, and proxy, which is when others help, bully the victim, sometimes the bully knows, and sometimes they don’t. Now not only does one person do it, but others feel the need to jump in. Sometimes without even being asked. Has this world really came to a place where we help others make somebody feel like they mean nothing in this world?
We cannot just sit around and let this happen anymore. According to bullyingstaristics.org “cyber bullying victims are more likely to have low self esteem and to consider suicide”. Why do we just sit around and let this happen? These kids are obviously in pain fro all of the tormenting and harassing that they have been handed to deal with.
Teenagers who are cyber bullied tend to be more clinically depressed, and socially awkward. As reported by nsc.org “Children who are victims of cyber bullying are at a higher risk for depression”. Truth of the matter is that if you are being bullied in any way, especially if it’s on your phone with no way to get away from it, then you are more likely to become depressed. Cyber bullying is often threatening, or telling you to end your life, so of course you’re not going to want to be around people. Many times they even tell you that not one person at your school likes you. This is going to get to most teenagers, if not all. It’s going to make them want to crawl under and rock, and some do take their lives.
How does cyber bullying affect the students at my school? In a class of 20, on a scale of one to ten on how much do they believe cyber bullying affects a students social life, 30% rate 1, 40% said 2, 2 said 3, 15% said 4, and 5% said 5. Many of these students don’t let it affect them, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect others. They could also be trying to hide their pain like many people do until they cannot handle it anymore. In addition to that, more than 50% of them said that they often see cyber bullying on social networking websites. Only a couple of them saying never, and a few say that they don’t often see it. This goes to show that it is out there each and everyday, for everyone to see.
Many of my classmates might not admit to cyber bullying, only 20% say that they have once in their life. But that doesn’t mean that they actually haven’t, in fact a lot of people do it subconsciously. Many people aren’t even aware of when they are putting others down or hurting them. But in some way or another everyone has cyber bullied someone once in his or her lives, even if it is just jumping in on someone else’s post.
Not only do people refuse to admit they have cyber bullied, they refuse to admit that they’re a victim as well. “Half of teens have been the victims of cyber bullying” says bullyinstatistics.org. 60% of my classmates say that they have never in their life been a victim of cyber bullying. People may not know they were a victim of it because cyber bullying has many different identities, that many people don’t know about. 40% said they have been a victim 1-4 times, making sense because even the most popular person in school is cyber bullied once in their life. But many people deny it, one because they don’t want to believe it themselves, and second because they don’t want many others to know about it. Bullyingstatistics.org claims that “well over half of young people do not even tell their parents when cyber bullying occurs”.
Most people ask, “why don’t we just take social networks away?” that will surely defeat cyber bullying, right? Wrong, even though it will, not everybody uses social networking cites to target other kids. Yes, they might get in a fight or two every once in a while, which can be considered cyber bullying. But they don’t literally sit there and target one person over and over again, for days on end. Potentially wanting to hurt them. So it wouldn’t be fair to those people who are using the sites correctly to permanently shut them down.
What we can do to prevent cyber bullying according to stopcyberbullying.org is to make “An anonymous way to report it”. Then banning them from the website that they are using. All this would take is having a report button each place someone could do something that could lead to bullying, which they already have. Then when you put in the reasoning for why this specific post is being reported, you may say it is because of cyber bullying. All the website needs to do is make sure they will not be able to use it any longer and there account will be deleted. We need to give the kids the courage to be able to report them.
Some parents are already trying to put and end to all of this nonsense. It may not be the easies thing in the world but its well over possible Why are we just sitting around letting teenagers control websites as big as Facebook and Twitter? We need to take them back over and make sure that cyber bullying comes to an end. Teenagers are teenagers for a reason, they are not in charge for a reason. We need to control there fat until they are mature enough to do it themselves. We cant sit around at a computer or walk around on our phones constantly putting our peers down. Threatening, harassing, tormenting, humiliating, and targeting them, making them feel as if they are below everyone, as if they don’t deserve to live on this planet. Ultimately making them end their lives. Is this the world we really want to live on?
Take a stand. Stand up against all of the cyber bullies out there. Make sure that they know what they are doing is wrong. Protect your children, and make our world something we should be happy about.