Cyber Bullying

Free Response

When I was trying to come up with my own topic this week, my mind started wandering to something very relevant to our world: bullying. Bullying has ALWAYS been a problem in society, whether it was happening on a playground or on an international level, bullying has always been around. A lot has been done about bullying, I even remember the numerous “treat others the way you want to be treated” discussions teachers had with us starting in Kindergarten.
The problem now is that bullying has found a new medium to thrive in: the internet. This is a new concept, but the severity of it is increasing on a daily basis, and therefore it demands our attention.
Online bullying can happen in a number of ways, and really it filters out into other forms of technology like texting, prank phone calls, etc. There are apps on the iPhone where you can call someone’s phone but have it show that it’s calling from someone else’s number! Do you know how much trouble that could cause? If not, then I have a story about that:
So, one day over summer I was woken up by a phone call from my boyfriend saying, “why did you write me that text message?” and, thinking he was referring to a loving one I had sent the night before, I replied “I always send texts like that”. He got angry, and hung up. I was very confused until he forwarded me the text that said, “I found someone that I think is hotter than your ugly ass”. I called him and told him repeatedly it wasn’t me, but he didn’t believe me. I called his friend because I had a feeling he was involved, and guess what??? His friend had found a site on the Internet where you can send text messages to anyone and have it look like someone else’s text as long as you know their phone number (he learned this from Jimmy Kimmel haha). This harmless prank actually got my boyfriend and I in an argument, and imagine what could have happened if we never found out? Imagine what could happen if someone wrote something even MORE hurtful?!
These types of technology can become really dangerous if it’s abused, just like most things the Internet offers. In high school, there were so many people that would get anonymous texts or Facebook messages that were really hurtful and cruel. These technologies are providing a mask for the bullies to hide behind, and even allowing people who would normally not be aggressive enough to bully in person, to express their feelings toward someone in a hurtful way. These mean messages were sometimes reported to faculty, but they really didn’t know how to approach it since technically it occurred outside of school and they don’t have the technology to necessarily track down a person’s phone number.
I think that schools and others must begin thinking about ways to prevent this kind of stuff, and to teach people to still respect one another, even when they think their identity is unknown. This type of bullying is much less monitored than the bullying that occurs face-to-face, yet it’s the most frequent form of emotional bullying that adolescents experience today; steps need to be taken in order to start intervening with this cyber bullying.