Cyberbullying: Online Cruelty

victimization, children, internet, cyberbullying

One In Three Children are Affected by Cyberbullying.

If these types of attacks and written slanderous comments occurred in day to day, face to face life in a “hometown”, police would be involved and criminal charges laid for “bullying, stalking and attacking people, threatening people, writing or saying defamatory statements.

By Citizen Correspondent Margaret Holborow

Date Posted: 11/09/07

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The advent of the Internet has seen an explosion of new world wide instant communication that has expanded our horizons, opened new ways of self publishing and new open freedom of speech outlets. Public opinion is a large part of what the growing Internet is all about. Forums, bulletin boards, instant messaging, networking sites, Weblogs, Media news feeds, feedback columns and email have allowed an open means of communication which has been invaluable to the people utilizing the services. Stories of lost relatives and children found, long lost school buddies reunited, great online love affairs, business and instant communication between long distant families have been the public face of the new “media” growth but with that growth, the rise of the flip-side has slipstreamed alongside, insidiously snowballing at the same rapid rate. Cyberbullying.

Internet feedback and instant worldwide communication has opened up both sides of the debate, any debate, and whatever debate is being discussed will always have dissenting, unique opinions and people ready to put their “two bits in” and who will go to varying lengths to get their opinions heard.

Weblogs and media outlets' comments sections are rife with people attacking others opinions and taking it to all sorts of dangerous personal levels. Networking sites like Myspace, Youtube and Facebook ,along with instant messaging programs like MSN, Yahoo and Skype, are all rife with bullies, attacking others opinions, stalking people and victimizing other users.

With many databases being stored online including phone directories, Google maps and Google Earth and search engines, tracing people and finding out personal data about them has taken on a new ease. No longer do the perpetrators have to leave their homes to search out information to trace people - information is available at the click of a mouse. All you need is a name, or a username, or a phone number, or a school or workplace. If it is an unusual name, bonus - the job is made easier, but even searches on common names can be narrowed to location, schools, date of birth and other relevant data.

Phone directories easily trace a name and an address, Google Maps and Google Earth can pinpoint that address with deadly accuracy for any Internet bully or stalker. Your stalker gets an overhead view of your house from just a few hundred feet up, complete with access points, windows and doors, along with vehicles usually stored at the address and neighbors' locations nearby. Google images often stores photographs of a person and Google web search does the rest.