Cyberbullying a menace - Know how to deal with it!!
Cyber bullying is an act when someone or a group of people uses any form of digital platforms of internet, to threaten, humiliate, tease or harm an individual. India is 3rd in rank in the world on incidents of cyber bullying. In most of the cases cyber bullying remain unnoticed and it leaves long lasting negative impact on victim. This post explains about some types of cyber bullying and its protection mantra.
Lead Writer:
- Ishita Aggarwal, 7th, Vishwa Bharati Public School, Noida
Contributed By:
- Rashi Gupta, 8th, DAV Public school Jasola Vihar, New Delhi
- Amaan Nizam, 11th , New Horizon School
- Aanya Kumari, 6th, DAV Public School, Jasola Vihar New Delhi
- Shruti Kumari, 9th, DAV Public School, Jasola Vihar New Delhi
Cartoon Contributed By:
- Rashi Gupta, 8th, DAV Public school Jasola Vihar, New Delhi
- Aditya Singh, 8th, Naval Children School, Delhi
What is Cyber Bullying?
Cyberbullying is the use of internet to harass, threaten, embarrass, or target another person. Cyber bullying can be in form of online threats and mean, aggressive, or rude texts, tweets, posts, or messages, posting personal information, pictures, or videos designed to hurt or embarrass someone else.
Incident:
A girl named Una was very fat, obese and short in height. Her classmates teased her even in the cyberspace. one of her classmates even created her fake account and uploaded her photographs with comment "I am fattest of all".
Other children of the school wrote nasty comments and made fun of her looks. As a result, Una became very lonely and depressed. As both her parents were working and living in a nuclear family, hence, they were not able to spend enough time with her. One day she decided to run away from home. That day she left school in a hurry and started towards the railway station. She could not see a truck coming in her direction and met with an accident. She was taken to hospital by the locals and the police where she was immediately treated. It took her almost four months to recover completely after the accident. Her parents were shocked and devastated. Police registered a case against children who created fake account and misused Una's photographs.
Types of Cyber bullying:
Name Calling: Is an abusive or insulting language used against a person or a group. In this form of bullying a person’s name, origin, ethnicity is used to insult or degrade the person.
Harassment: It is a form cyber bullying when a bully uses offensive, rude, insulting message, humiliating post and photo of a person on social media site to hurt and threaten the individual.
Impersonation: In this form of cyber bullying, bully either hack individual’s social media account or create a fake profile of an individual by doing identify theft and start sending vicious and embarrassing material online.
Flaming: When a person purposely using inflammatory or offensive language on internet against an individual to get that person involved in only argument or fight.
Cyber Stalking: When a bully stalk a victim online and keep sending messages includes threats to harm, harassment and intimidating messages, or engaging in other online activities that forces a person to become afraid and get scarred about his or her safety.
Bullying by spreading rumours and gossip: Spreading a news and gossip and something viral about an individual is another form of cyber bullying.
Impacts of cyber bullying:
As teen’s brain is not fully mature to share the agony with teachers and parents, cyber bullying can lead to serious long-lasting impact on a victim. The stress of being in a constant state of upset or fear can lead to psychological problems with his/her mood, sleep, and appetite. It also can make someone anxious, sad, depressed and suicidal. If someone is already depressed or anxious, cyberbullying can make things much worse.
- Walk away. Keep away from the such bullies. Ignoring is the best way to take away bullies’ interest in you. All the social media platform gives you option to block any users making you uncomfortable online. Block such people.
- Tell someone: If you find in a place where you feel that someone is trying to bully you online the first thing you need to do is tell an adult you trust. If for some reason, you are unable to tell any adult in fear, share it with few of your close friends.
- Keep a log of any messages or texts, take screenshots and don’t delete anything. This will help when explaining what’s happening to you.
- Report bullying: whenever you feel you are being victim of cyber bully report to police with the help of your family.
- Be Upstander: If you find anyone in your friend circle being bullied, stand up to protect him/her and involve others to discourage the bully. Tell an adult about it.
To learn more about cyber security read weseso blogs, written by students from different schools. You can also write blogs and take part in various knowledge sharing discussion. To get involved, you first need to become a cyber warrior and become a part of larger community who are committed to secure family, friends and society from cyber crime.
To know how to become a cyber warrior, click the link: https://weseso.org/how-to-become-a-cyber-warrior/