‘A guide to cyberbullying’, a joint initiative by the Office for Internet Safety.
Click here to view the PDF document
Bullying is repeated aggression, verbal, psychological or physical abuse. Bullying isn’t always face to face. Due to the advancements of technology there are various mediums one can use to bully another. A common form of bullying is online bullying.
There are plenty of ways people like to bully online. Here are the 5 mentioned in the article:
1. Personal Intimidation: This can be posting abusive or threatening comments on someone’s profile.
2. Impersonation: When someone sets up a fake
profile or web pages acting as the victim.Impersonation can also happen when someone’s profile or IM account is hacked and others are contacted under their name.
3. Exclusion: The blocking of an individualfrom a group or community on facebook or Myspace etc.
4. Personal Humiliation:This involves posting images or videos which embarrass or humiliate someone.
5. False Reporting: Making false reports to a service provider to have the user’s account or website deleted.
So If you are being bullied online what can you do?
Don’t Reply, this is what the bully wants
Keep the Message. This is useful evidence
Tell Someone you trust e.g. Your parents,friends, a teacher or youth leader.
Block the Sender.
Report Problems to the people who can do something about it i.e. responsible websites and mobile phone operators.
As someone who has experienced online harassment from a photo posted up on a public facebook group I can personally say that the above recommendations work. I did not reply to the stranger and I immediately made the group administators aware of the comment by giving them the link to the photo in a private message. They were very helpful and messaged me back. They deleted the abusive comment and blocked the harasser from the group. I was very grateful at how helpful they were as I had never up until then experienced any online abuse before since I am very cyber smart and I don’t like putting my personal life out there for everyone to see.
Check out the Cybersmart website and twitter page for great resources and advice:
https://twitter.com/CybersmartACMA
