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Cyberbully Lab Report

Wenjie Chen

The City College of New York

Professor: Maria Vint

ENGL 21007
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Abstract
In recent years, cyberbullying has become a major issue for teens because the population

uses malicious attacks on the Internet, such as threats and insults. Cyberbullying is a ubiquitous

danger, especially to the adult population. Through electronic devices that have access to the

Internet, mostly smartphones and computer, cyberbullying pollutes the network and the culture

of social media. Furthermore, cyberbullying also causes serious harm to the mental health of

young people, leaving them feeling lonely, depressed and even suicidal. Bullying can happen

anywhere, not just during school time. Research shows cyberbullying usually occurs between

schoolmates. Based on the newspaper, about 60% of the network victims are girls, and 52% of

the network victims are boys. Most network victims and witnesses have not reported the fact of

being bullied or seeing bullying to adults. This report will define each type of cyberbullying,

laws and policies of cyberbullying, and use anonymous methods to study and adopt responses.

Based on the survey conducted, the main findings focus on who are the particular population the

victims of the cyberbully and how people deal with cyberbullying.

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Cyberbully

Bullying is an aggressive behavior caused by power imbalance and it can result in

persistent injury for people who are bullied. The traditional bullying behavior in school can be

divided into direct bullying and indirect bullying. Direct bullying is a blatant and obvious way to

attack victims in physical or verbal form. Indirect bullying is conducted in a less-obvious way

(such as isolation, exclusion, or gossip, etc.), or using an individual’s social status and power to

control or change the perception of others.

The form of violence has gradually changed as technology developed and the ways of

communication evolved. Bullying no longer only exists within school settings and cyberbully is

becoming more common. There are many definitions of cyberbullying, and to put it simple,

cyberbullying is through the use of the Internet and electronic devices, a long-term, repetitive,

malicious, hostile behavior of individuals or groups that make others to feel threatened,

humiliated, intimidated, upset, and even endanger their own personal safety.

Cyberbully can be roughly divided into the following seven categories.

1. Flaming: sending irritating and vulgar information. This is due to disagreement or

misunderstanding of what others have said and decided to argue with it.

2. Online harassment: continue to harass others by email or text message. Such as

annoying, vulgar, sexually suggestive, and insulting.

3. Cyberstalking: Send harmful, threatening or excessively defamatory words over

the network.

4. Denigration: Send untrue or cruel statement about someone then upload it to the

web.
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5. Masquerade: Pretending to be a person's identity to post information online,

damaging others.

6. Outing: Publish others sensitive, private or embarrassing information.

7. Exclusion: Exclude someone from a chat room or virtual community to isolate

them.

In recent years, with the development and popularization of the Internet, cyberbully has

begun to rise among young people, and its severity is no less than of past school violence. To an

extreme, some victims of cyberbully even want to commit suicide. The United States, Canada,

Australia, Japan, and many countries have a lot of tragedies caused by cyberbullying among

teens. These cases show that the problem of cyberbully has begun to erode the healthy

development of young people.

 On the CBS News, December 2, 2016, a Texas 18-years-old girl shoots herself in the chest

in front of her family members. The reason for this tragedy is she had been receiving

abusive text messages for months from bullies using an untraceable smartphone application.

Someone made a fake Facebook page of her and created another cyberbullying medium.

 According to the ABC newspaper, in Panama City, a 12-year-olds girl hanged herself to

death. On her phone, the police found there were two students’ bruit victims having

sexually transmitted diseases, vulgar name-calling, and threats to 'expose' personal and

sensitive details of the victim's life.

 In November 2002, Quebec, Canada, Ghyslain Raza made a self-portrait video “Star

Wars Kid”, he imitates the Jessus warrior in the “Star Wars” dancing laser sword. The

video was uploaded to the Internet by a classmate in 2003 and has been clicked by
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netizens to watch more than 900 million times. However, because his shape of the body

and the unskilled movements on the Internet have brought great psychological distress to

this high school student. Ghyslain Raza, who was ridiculed everywhere, had to drop out

of school and receive psychotherapy.

As shown on the above, all three cases are of cyberbullying, and yet these cases are only

the tip of the iceberg. Cyberbullying is very harmful to the physical and psychological life of the

victims. Cyberbullying can cause long-term psychological harm to adolescents, including loss of

self-confidence, frustration, temper, decline in academic performance, truancy, and even school

violence or suicide. The harm caused by cyberbullying may be greater than that of traditional

bullying.

With more and more victims, more laws and regulations have been enacted to protect the

safety of young people online. For example, Canada has amended the Safe Campus Law. For the

first time, the law explicitly prohibited students from uploading their photos or video of attacking

teachers or other students on websites such as YouTube. Moreover, Arkansas passed a law in

2007 that allowed schools to punish the cyber butler because their community and many parents

are reaction the issue of cyberbully, and even the bullying did not originate or occurred on

campus. In U.S., 47 out of 50 states are prohibiting a statement of the cyberbully. Each state has

also opened a network hotline to encourage reporting and consultation. The education

department has also set up a dedicated website to provide parents with the latest cybersecurity

information.
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According to the History of Adolescent Psychiatry survey, more than one-third of

American teenagers had been bullied when they conduct real-time conversations and visit social

networking sites, and those who are bullies are often their classmates. Many teens might know

about cyberbullying, but not necessarily understand it or realize how harmful it could be. In the

cycle of bullying, they may be the victim of a cyberbully, become executors of cyberbullying or

bystanders whose behaviors encourage bullying. The survey conducted for this report put into

the consideration of the gender and age differences, and their history of cyberbully, to research

and discover how people are responding to the cyberbully today, and which population has

experienced cyberbully.

Methods

I created a survey about cyberbully, in the survey there has 10 questions, 7 multiple and 3

open question. The question I created is based on my knowledge of cyberbully and direction of

my lab reports. The survey link was posted on my Facebook and CCNY Student Life APP, and it

was also sent to classmates and friends. In the survey, there are ten questions, seven multiple

choice questions, and three open answer questions. The total number of the respondents is 54,

and their gender, age, self-awareness, and understanding of cyberbully were gathered. These

mixed methods approaches quantitate people’s knowledge of cyberbullying and their experience.

This survey was voluntary and confidential.

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Results

Out of 54 respondents, there were 25 men, 28 women, and 1 unknown. Almost all

participants know what is cyberbully, and only two people are not sure. The data shows that 13

out of 54 confirmed that they have experienced cyber violence, with 7 female, 5 men, and 1

unknown. And 34 people has been seen a cyberbully in the Internet. Also, I collect their feeling

during the survey, based on 1(bad)-5(happy), 25 people are 1, 5 people are 2, 1 people are 3. 10

people are 4, 1 people are 5.

Discussion

The primary intent of this research study was to survey people’s knowledge and

their experiences of cyberbully. The questions and the answers of the survey makes it a

comprehensive assessment for this research. Like most research reports, the proportion of

cyber victims to female is higher than men. Most people choose to ignore when there is a

cyberbully. Also, this survey asked for personal meaning and feeling when they

participate in this survey. Through accurate statistics and classification, the survey results

indicate, those people who have been cyberbullied before, their mood on the survey is

either 3 or 2. A study was done by Bauman, Toomey, and Walker (2013) found that people

who have been cyberbullied before have a higher incidence of depression. Also, only the

study the feature of depression is depressed and sad, but through the survey, the victims of

cyberbullying claim their characters to be confident or energetic. The possible reason for

that is they have not been affected by cyberbully and have protected themselves well. The

survey results also indicate that people are choosing the wrong opinion to as their solution
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to cyberbully. Based on the Cyberbullying Research Center, most people choose to ignore

cyberbully, but instead it may increase and encourage the false behaviors of cyberbully.

The right solution is to report bullies in order to have them punished. Additionally, in this

research, the question set in the survey is too fundamental and did not unfolding on one

special topic.

Conclusion

The research projects cyberbullying has gradually become a serious social problem. This

problem should receive more attention from people through the joint efforts of schools, families,

and society. Only by improving relevant laws and regulations for effective governance, the

“virtual world” will become safer for everyone.

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Reference List
 Public Affairs. (2019, December 4). Laws, Policies & Regulations. Retrieved

from http://www.stopbullying.gov/laws/index.html.

 Hoff, D., & Mitchell, S. (2009). Cyberbullying: causes, effects, and

remedies. Journal of Educational Administration, 47(5), 652-665.

 Qing Li. (2007). New bottle but old wine: A research of cyberbullying in schools.

Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, 23(5), 1777-1791.

 Sameer, H. & Justin, W. (2010). Bullying, cyberbullying, and suicide. Journal of

Archives of Suicide Research, 14, 206-221.

 Hinduja, S. & Patchin, J. W. (2008). Cyberbullying: An Exploratory Analysis of

Factors Related to Offending and Victimization. Deviant Behavior. 29 (2), pp

129–156.

 Bauman, S., Toomey, R. B., & Walker, J. L. (2013). Associations among

bullying, cyberbullying, and suicide in high school students. Journal of

Adolescence, 36(2), 341-350.