Traditional vs. Cyberbullying in Children

Abstract

Cyberbullying is a relatively new concept that emerged in the light of progress associated with the development of the Internet and various online communication tools. Researchers investigated the impact of cyberbullying on children and teenagers and compared its effects with the influence of traditional bullying. It was found that around 11% of children or teenagers were once victims of cyberbullying, approximately 7% were both bullied and were bullies, and 4% of them bullied someone else online. Compared to the statistics of traditional bullying occurrence, it can be suggested that cyberbullying is far less persistent. The paper focused on investigating the difference between cyberbullying and traditional bullying of children and teenagers, suggesting that there is a problem in how they use the Internet and social media to communicate.

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It was concluded that children and teenagers are far more likely to react emotionally to verbal abuse online due to their lack of experience communicating with other people: what adults may shrug off, children will take too seriously. Therefore, it is the parents’ job to ensure that their children use the Internet safely and take precautions to prevent online abuse from occurring. Modern social media platforms offer their users options to block and blacklist certain people, make their profile private and only available to friends, and so on. Cyberbullying will end when parents teach their children to ignore the abusive language, not read mean comments, and report offensive language; possessing knowledge on how to use the Internet can significantly reduce the instances of online harassment. Overall, digital bullying is less of an issue compared to traditional bullying in real-life situations when abuse can get physical and lead to adverse implications.