Bullying 2.0
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Insults, threats, humiliations - “cyber-bullying” amounts to terrorising people on the internet. With the help of e-mails, instant messenging or social networks such as Facebook, victims are harassed and tormented. Often those affected do not even know who is behind the attacks.
"You're ugly, you're too fat; You were not even born here, get lost!" - these are typical anonymous comments left on a blog, much to the blog owner's distress. The bully, who for obvious reasons does not reveal his or her identity, has struck again.
Although bullying and teasing has long been part and parcel the school experience, e-bullying opens all kinds of possibilities to take this harassment to new levels. Whole groups of people can suddenly turn on individual classmates, coordinating and meticulously planning their attacks online.
This kind of virtual attack was blamed for the causing the suicide of 15-year-old girl near the English city of Gloucester last September. The girl jumped off a bridge after repeatedly being subject to torrents of abuse from other young people on her Facebook page.
In a second case in the UK, a teenager was sentenced to three months in a juvenile detention centre in August 2009 after she had threatened a former classmate with death on Facebook.
All this goes to prove that cyber-bullying is not a laughing matter.
Fighting back
But there are ways to tackle cyber-bullying.
By law, unauthorized comments about an individual have to be deleted by the operators of any internet site, if the person involved requests this. If this step fails, victims can go one step further and report the bullying to the police.
While in Europe, so far E-bullying seems to mostly affect young people, there are also reports of adults falling victim to online harassment. Cyber-bullying is still a new phenomenon, though, and so scientific studies are rare.
According to the 2008 and 2009 JIM studies, surveys on the use of the media conducted in Germany, one-quarter of young people between the ages 12 to 19 claim that they know of cases of internet bullying within their circle of friends and acquaintances.
