Notes

Cyberbullying and How it Affects Adolescents
Topic Proposal
Yazeed Alzaidi
The Pennsylvania State University
April 10, 2020













Cyberbullying and How it Affects Adolescents
The act of bullying and harassing an individual through messages that could either be via voice chat or texting is how multiple researchers would define cyberbullying (Williams & Godfrey, 2011). This problem started around the early 2010s as a new way of harassment and has been evolving ever since. Around 2009, when this issue began to escalate, many stories and news about teenagers taking their own life because of the cyberbullying they received spread all over the world (Fredrick, 2013). Phoebe Prince, a teenage girl, was a victim of this problem. In February 2010, she was cyberbullied and harassed verbally via text messages and sadly ended her life when she was not able to take the harassment anymore (2011). In the past, the act of cyberbullying was a new topic and the limits that it could reach were unknown. However, nowadays the level that this problem could get to is fairly predictable. In addition, there are six characteristics of cyberbullying that turn people cyberbullies discovered by Internet psychologist John Suler and cited by Jeremy Dean in a PsyBlog post. If a person was fully aware of these characteristics, it may lead them to become cyberbullies. These characteristics are anonymity, invisibility, no police, an imaginary world, could be described as voices in your head and the disability to see one’s body language, or comments during the action of bullying (2013). Moreover, the internet’s availability everywhere plays a huge part in the emerging of cyberbullying since it forces teenagers to stay plugged into this virtual world which increases the probability of being a victim of this problem. In addition, generally victims of cyberbullying develop mental and physical health conditions that have an effect on their life as a whole, which includes their school performance (2011).
A study that was done in 2013 in Pew Research Center. The results of this study show that about 21% of the kids that registered in this research between the ages of 8 to 10 years old declared that they have never been victims of cyberbullying in their life. One the other hand, approximately 88% of adolescents that use social media have at least seen a person being harsh and cruel towards another on the social media. Furthermore, almost 33% of adolescents claimed that they were cyberbullied at least once in their life. This study gets more frightening when only 7% of parents in the United States tried to inform their children about this issue and were actually concerned about the scary outcomes while unanimously 93% did not proceed with any measurements with cyberbullying and treated it like it was nothing (Woda, 2015).
Williams and Godfrey state that according to David Walsh, an American psychologist, “An adolescent's brain is not fully developed in the prefrontal cortex, the area that controls the assessment of risk behaviors and consequences related to these risks” (2011). Williams and Godfrey claim that if a teenager was to release their private details on the social media with no caution to whether someone may utilize them in an inappropriate manner, they would be in deep danger which would possibly lead them to mental illness, especially if they were not able to get away from the mental torture that has been put upon them. In general, teenagers would not tend to have a clear mind when they are experiencing a fluctuation of feelings, thus most of their decisions would lack common sense and the capability to create wise decisions (Williams & Godfrey, 2011).
Cyberbullying is a huge topic which mostly affects adolescents that are likely going to be leaders and carry the future; thus, many solutions have been discussed to put an end to this problem. Three educators from a middle school in Pennsylvania collaborated to give a lesson on cyberbullying. Jennifer O’Donnell’s “Texting and Cell Phone Etiquette for Tweens” is one possible solution that the educators discussed to solve this problem. Furthermore, messaging should be short and straight, messaging a friend while talking to another is considered rude which would cause hurt feelings, avoid texting angry friends and messaging should not limit face to face interactions with friends (Beaufort, Fabian & Jaros, 2013). Another solution is for a school to update their student code of conduct which happened previously in Pasco County in Florida. Nancy Willard, the executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, said that many adolescents’ activities on the social media consists of going through blogs and messaging sites on a daily basis. Consequently, putting limits to the daily social media use is a strong method to prevent cyberbullying (Stover, 2006). Overall, the first possible solution which focused on etiquettes by Jennifer O’Donnell would be the more suitable option since these tips are going to be learned easily when compared to forcing strict rules. When you are forced to go to a certain direction, you would develop a feeling of curiosity to find out what lies on the other side, but if you are taught what is right and what is wrong, then you would be more understanding as to why you are not allowed to go the other way.










References
Beaufort, C., Fabian, L., & Jaros, J. (2013). A collaborative lesson to end cyberbullying. School Library Monthly, 30(1), 31.
Fredrick, K. (2013). Dealing with cyberbullying: Educating students. School Library Monthly, 30(1), 24.
Merrill, R. M., & Hanson, C. L. (2016). Risk and protective factors associated with being bullied on school property compared with cyberbullied. BMC Public Health, 16(1), 145-10. doi:10.1186/s12889-016-2833-3
Stover, D. (2006). Treating cyberbullying as a school violence issue. The Education Digest, 72(4), 40.
Williams, S. G., & Godfrey, A. J. (2011). What is cyberbullying & how can psychiatric-mental health nurses recognize it? Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, 49(10), 36-41. doi:10.3928/02793695-20110831-03
Woda, T. (2015). Cyberbullying: Children as victims and predators. USA Today, 143(2836), 32.