Cyberbullying

What is cyberbullying? Cyberbullying is when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones. Cyberbullying can be done in two ways:direct attacks or cyberbullying by proxy. Why cyberbully? Usually the cyberbully is motivated by anger, frustration, and revenge or merely for their own entertainment. With the increasing amount of technology readily available to anyone, cyberbullying is becoming easier and easier. This being said, there are more and more prevention methods becoming available. A site called, cyberbullying.ca outlines these steps and is reaching out to help kids keep themselves more aware of how cyberbullying works and what we can do to stop this. There are also many programs that try to take action and make a stand against cyberbullying. These programs include Stop, Block and Tell, Take 5!, and many other government sites that outline specific steps to get help depending on which level of cyberbullying is taking place. Because cyberbullying is becoming more and more prominent in schools throughout the entire world, there have been many videos made to show the affects of cyberbullying. A video called “ Cyberbullying – Lets fight it together” is a story about a boy named Joe who is bullied through text message, instant messaging, emails, phone calls and even a website made about himself. In this video it shows what it is like to be bullied from his perspective and the extremes it can go to. Although in this video he does not go to the highest extreme, which would be death or suicide, there are many other instances where this extreme has prevailed. The Ryan Halligan story is an example where suicide has taken place because of cyberbullying. Ryan was a 13 year old boy from Essex Junction, Vermont who committed suicide because of real life bullying as