The Issues of Cyber Bullying

Have you ever been cyber bullied? Do you know someone who has been cyber bullied? Do you understand how being cyber bullied feels? Can you imagine the amount of agony teenagers go through when they’re being cyber bullied? With all things considered, cyberbullying must be stopped to help thousands of teenagers worldwide. Cyber bullying can diminish a teen’s self-esteem, bring teens into depression, and worst of all cyber bullying can lead to teens taking their own lives.

First and foremost cyber bullying can be catastrophic. For one thing, cyberbullying can lower a teenager’s self-esteem. What readers need to understand is that not everyone can just ignore what the bully is expressing to them. This is why cyber bullying can affect anyone. Cyber bullying affects victim’s lives in an atrocious manner. This is because when a bully is criticizing someone for all of their insecurities it can be a dreadful process to go through. Being cyber bullied constantly can decrease self-esteem, with a diminished self-esteem it frightens victims to even step foot into a school. This is because the victim is self-conscious, they’re constantly wondering if they look beautiful or sound amazing. Hearing this, people believe that this is not what a teenager needs because it can put teenagers into a state of depression. On the contrary, people believe that teenagers need someone who will provide positive reinforcement, which is someone who can make them smile, not someone who will make them cry.

In addition to lowering self-esteem, cyber bullying can cause harm is emotionally. A victim of cyberbullying can be forced into depression. When a teenager is going through depression, it could be extraordinarily tough since they’re beginning to hit puberty. Puberty can interfere with mood since it’s changing your body, adding new hormones and you’re also beginning to grow. This can be a reason to why teens think ever more negatively; especially when they’re being bullied it can make teens unhappy. Generally, as teenagers go through troublesome times they often don’t share their emotions with a mature adult. Teenagers generally keep their emotions to themselves, which often times can lead to self-harm. An example of this would be a teenager named Amanda Todd. Amanda Todd was bullied when she was sixteen. The reason she was bullied was because she commissioned provocative photos of herself to a nineteen year-old boy. After they were forwarded to the boy he began to escalate them across the internet. Soon everyone in her school saw the pictures and began calling her cruel and inappropriate names. This caused Amanda Todd to become depressed, she lost all of her friends and had no one to talk to or express her feelings to – she was alone. All of the hateful remarks followed her everywhere she went; eventually it followed her to her grave.

As a result of her suicide thousands of people mourned for her. The reason to why it became incredibly known across the world was because before she committed suicide, she explained her dreadful story of being cyber bullied over a platform called YouTube in 2013. In the hopes that many people would learn how cruel bullying can be. As a result of that YouTube video millions of people worldwide saw her story and sympathized with her. However, thousands of people online continued to criticize her saying cruel remarks like, “She deserved to die” and still continued to call her cold-blooded names. People in this world are heartless, they don’t care about how you feel or about your period. The only concern that these bullies care about is themselves, no one else matters to them. Consequently, it usually leads to bullies harassing someone nonstop. However, it’s usually for a reason, such as: them being jealous of something you have or of you all together. Therefore, they’ll bully you to compensate for something that they’re lacking. Often times this is the reason that bullies continuously pick on someone without caring about how they feel or what the consequences will be. According to BullyStatistics.org about 80% of teens have access to a phone and 81% of teens believe that cyber bullying is easier to get away with than any other form of bullying, which is why cyber bullying is the most common form of bullying. This is why there is more cyber bullying related deaths. In 2015 the statistics for suicide were about 4,400 teens committed suicide and 7% of high school students have attempted suicide. These numbers are far more than the year before. This is a result of the constant technological advances that make messaging far which is why cyberbullying is more frequent now.

On the contrary, there are people who disagree and may claim that teenagers can just ignore the cyber bullying. However, this can be especially difficult because if teens connect onto a website to talk to some friends these messages will come up. Message notifications come out of nowhere and right as it pops up the reader’s eyes are already jumping from word to word. It’s legitimately difficult to not read what’s intended for you, especially if you don’t know what it’s about beforehand. People still believe that the victim can just tell their parents. However, if the bully is unknown what can the parent do to help? Nowadays parents aren’t as tech savvy as teenagers are, therefore if the teenager can’t stop it what can a parent do? Another argument that people have brought up is the fact that the teenagers can just move schools. Yes, this could be a valid argument for physical bullying; however cyber bullying doesn’t need to happen in school, which is why changing schools doesn’t necessarily affect cyber bullying. This is why cyberbullying is unquestionably dangerous, considering it can happen anywhere at any moment.

When considering the issue of cyberbullying it is clear that it causes teens to decrease in the amount of self-confidence, it also goes hand in hand with bringing teens into a depression, and worst of all it has made teenagers commit suicide. Cyber bullying is dangerous; it can destroy a person’s heart. Would you want your little sibling to go through so much pain and heartache that Amanda Todd went through? If not you can help too, try to talk to everyone, even if you don’t know them, because one of those people could be depressed with no one to talk to. Another way you can help is if you know someone is being bullied, try to stop it because if you ignore the problem it could become worse. The worst would be blood and tears that were caused because of cyber bullying would be with you all because you ignored what was going on.