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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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 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 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
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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, 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.

According to the 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.

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Methods

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

cyberbully and their experience. This survey is voluntary and confidential.

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. 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.

Discussion

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

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

a comprehensive assessment for this research. Also, this survey asked for personal

meaning and feeling when they participate in this survey. Through accurate statistics and
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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. The feature of depression is depressed and sad, but through the

survey, the victims of cyberbully 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 way

to as their solution to cyberbully. 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

 Government United States (2018) “Laws, Policies & Regulations”

StopBullying.gov, www.stopbullying.gov/laws/index.html

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

remedies", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 47 No. 5, pp. 652-

665.

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

schools”, Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 23 No. 4, pp

1777-1791.

 Sameer, H. & Justin, W. (2010), “Bullying, cyberbullying, and suicide”,

Journal of Archives of Suicide Research, Vol. 14, pp206-221.

 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.