Attention
A 12-year-old girl from Florida, Gabriella Green, committed a suicide after her peers spread derogatory comments about her on social media (Lynch, 2018). Gabriella did not want to live in the world where she is publicly humiliated by other students online. This example of cyberbullying is not unusual because thousands of people are being harassed and humiliated on the Internet today. We must be more attentive to spot bullying. In addition to spotting it, we must also do everything we can to stop it.
Need
Cyberbullying is an act of spreading false, harmful, sensitive, and negative content with the view to embarrassing, threatening, humiliating or offending another person or group of people that takes place on the Internet (Hinduja & Patchin, 2014). Cyberbullying is now one of the most widespread forms of bullying (Yanez & Lessne, 2015). Fifteen percent of high school students are subject to cyberbullying (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). Victims of cyberbullying face depression, anger, frustration, suicidal thoughts, low self-esteem, embarrassment, and poor academic performance.
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Satisfaction
Although cyberbullying is hard to notice, we can solve it with a coordinated effort targeting victims, parents, social media owners, educators, and policymakers. We must require schools to develop programs to educate students on cyberbullying and an appropriate online behavior (McLeaod, 2018). We must encourage victims of cyberbullying to report it to the police. We must demand from social media to require identity verification so that a reported account can be linked to the real person responsible for bulling.
Visualization
If the aforementioned coordinated plan is not executed, people will face the future where anyone can become a victim of persistent and permanent harassment and humiliation online. The future in which bullied children are afraid to go to school because they are too embarrassed does not look bright. If we ignore the problem, more innocent minors and adults would die.
Action
Therefore, we must take an immediate coordinated action to do everything that is required to spot cyberbullying. We must put pressure of educators, social media, and policymakers to step up in the fight against cyberbullying. We must encourage victims to report to the police. We should do this before millions of lives are broken.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance. Surveillance Summaries, 67(8), 1-479. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/
- Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2014). Cyberbullying: Identification, Prevention, & Response. Cyberbullying Research Center. Retrieved from http://cyberbullying.o_GoBack_GoBackrg
- Lynch, J. (2018). Police accuse two students, age 12, of cyberbullying in suicide. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com
- McLeaod, S. (2018). Cyber-bullying. Centre for suicide prevention. Retrieved from https://www.suicideinfo.ca/
- Yanez, C., & Lessne, D. (2015). Student Victimization in U.S. Schools. The National Center of Education Statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/
