What is Cyberbullying?
- Sending mean, vulgar, or threatening messages or images
- Posting sensitive, private information about another person
- Pretending to be someone else in order to make that person look bad
- Intentionally excluding someone from an online group
How to Help Your Child
- What do I do if my child is experiencing cyberbullying?
- What do I do if my child is bullying other kids online?
Preventing Cyberbullying
- Bullying Prevention: At School and Online
- What To Do When Your Child is the Victim of Cyberbullying
- Cyberbullying & Bullying-Related Suicides: 1 Way to Help Our Digital-Age Kids
- Gay & Lesbian Youth Likely Victims of Cyberbullying
- What To Do When Your Child is the Victim of Cyberbullying
- The Internet at Home: Making it Work for You and Your Kids
- Cyberbullying: An Old Problem With a New Face
Possible Short-Term Effects:
- Anxiety
- Loneliness
- Low self-esteem
- Poor social self-competence
- Depression
- Psychosomatic symptoms
- Social withdrawal
- School refusal
- School absenteeism
- Poor academic performance
- Physical health complaints
- Running away from home
- Alcohol and drug use
- Suicide
Possible Long-Term Effects:
- High rates of depression
- Social anxiety
- Pathological perfectionism
- Greater neuroticism in adulthood
- Childhood bullying is a highly memorable experience and recollections of these events show no evidence of forgetting
Source: What Happens Over Time to Those Who Bully and Those Who are Victimized? Patricia McDougall, PhD, Tracy Vaillancourt, PhD & Shelley Hymel, PhD
- The victim has no place to hide; the bully can target them anytime and anyplace.
- Cyberbullying can involve a very wide audience (e.g. through the circulation of video clips on the internet), although the bully may not be aware of their reactions.
- The bully is relatively protected by the anonymity of electronic forms of contact, which acts as a safeguard against retaliation or sanctions.
- As with some indirect traditional bullying, the cyberbully does not usually see the response of the victim, changing the satisfactions or inhibitions normally generated by this.
- Adolescents who tended to spend more time online tended also to report that they cyberbullied or were themselves cyberbullied more frequently.
Additional Content
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1.
School-Based Cyberbullying Interventions
Definition of Cyberbullying Cyberbullying is a growing trend with school-aged children. Current estimates are that as...
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2.
Clicks, Cliques & Cyberbullying: Whole-School Response is Key
To deal with the serious problem of cyberbullying, schools need to understand that it's not really about technology and...
Source: Connect Safely -
3.
Cyber-Bullying: An Old Problem with a New Face
Harassment used to occur in the writing on the bathroom stall, but with 99 percent of teens being wired, harassment has...
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4.
'Cyberbullying' Better Defined
We're seeing some big victimization numbers, but let's be sure we really know what cyberbullying is. This is important,...
Source: Connect Safely -
5.
What to do When Your Child Is the Victim of Cyberbullying
These are children whose names have become inextricably linked to the issue of cyberbullying. Their pictures and stories...
Source: NetSmartz
Is my child cyberbullied?
Possible warning signs
- Avoids the computer, cell phone, and other technological devices or appears stressed when receiving an e-mail, instant message, or text
- Withdraws from family and friends, or acts reluctant to attend school and social events
- Avoids conversations about computer use
- Exhibits signs of low self-esteem including depression and/or fear
- Grades begin to decline
- Lack of eating or sleeping
Questions and Answers on Bullying
See recent questions and answers on dealing with bullying.
