Shirley Elliott
Sociology 1015
Professor Carol Kauppi, Ph.D.
Increasing public awareness of the frequency and damaging effects caused from cyberbullying behavior have set off alarms in people. Extreme examples of cyberbullying have been featured extensively in the news and have motivated parents, school systems, and politicians to help eliminate acts of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying inflicts aggressive behavior (i.e. threatening of peers, spreading of rumors) by cyber technologies such as computer, cell phone, and personal digital assistant. Cyberbullying compared to traditional bullying is more prevalent in today’s society primarily due to technological availability, anonymity, and correlation to traditional aggressors. …show more content…
297), “...cyber technology provides new tools for youth who already engage in aggressive behaviors in the physical world to victimize peers in cyberspace”. Cyberbullying is a subgroup of cyber aggression that involves the intention to repeatedly harm and create an imbalance of power. This is similar to the definition of physical (traditional) bullying (Dempsey, Sulkowski, Dempsey, & Storch, 2011). This type of aggressive behavior may be particularly damaging to a child’s mental development and social adaptation. For example, bullying can now extend beyond school grounds and into the home, which was a safe haven from attacks (Schoffstall & Cohen, 2011). With the various technological means and the fact that most adolescents have access to at least one cyber technology, the attacks can take place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This magnifies the emotional distress of the attacks on the adolescents. In research reported by Ybarra and Mitchell (2004) and Beran and Li (2005), it is clear that cyberbullying is a relatively widespread occurrence in the lives of children and adolescents (Schoffstall & Cohen,