Exploring The Causes And Effects Of Cyber-bullying

Introduction

Cyber-bullying can be defined as the act of individuals using the internet with the help of electronic devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and computers to deliberately cause recurrent harm to other persons. This harm may involve embarrassing them, and these acts occur mostly on social media platforms and email accounts. Cyber-bullying occurs I different ways like continued stoking on email accounts, sexual harassment, and threats. Individuals exercising cyber-bullying have been seen to expose the targeted person's personal information like full names, addresses, and phone numbers on different websites and other forums'.

In the current century, cyber bullying has increased. This mostly affects the youths who are most attached to social life. According to several studies carried concerning this issue, about 42% of the teenagers have experienced cyber bullying. With more than 25% of the youth experiencing cyber bullying a couple of times, with causes of being threatened seen to be more. Most of the teenagers who have been bullied online are not able to identify the individuals who are responsible.

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Cyber bullying has been seen to cause significant health problems among victims like depression, anger, paranoid, frustration, and suicidal thoughts. It remains a concern as it is hard to find the offenders because they hide their identity. Because most of them create fake social profiles, names, and email addresses intending to harass and bully people.

Causes of Cyber bullying

Revenge- Some people develops the idea of bullying others as a result of bringing victims when older siblings or parents bully an individual; they may feel offended.

For them to be equal, and the perpetrators cannot have the courage to bully the people who bullied them, they use digital tools to intimidate others. Cyber bullying is turned to what happens in the real world, but now it is carried through media.

Jealousy-When an individual may turn to be successful in their lives, this may draw the attention of the individual, and they feel frustrated to the point of becoming jealous. With this feeling, they express it by bullying others to undermine the valuable attributes of the individuals.

Lack of understanding or empathy of that causes cyber-buying; this is impacted by the personality attributes like low understanding. This causes individuals to develop a bias towards a certain race, religion, or sexual gender. People with these personalities will justify their hatred by exercising cyber-bullying.

Another cause of cyber-bullying is the desire to create attention some of the perpetrators who exercise bully activities do not consider themselves as being bullies. They have a notion that they only do that a way to tease peoples a bit to become friends or communicate with the people they are bullying. The perpetrators can attain their planned purpose only by drawing the attention of the victims. Dysfunctional families are another cause of cyber-bullying according to several studies, it has been discovered that most of the bullies originate from homes that lack openness and affection.

Finally, most perpetrators get into bullying, intending to gain control over other individuals by instilling fear. Upon instilling fear among individuals, the bullies acquire powers to control individuals; these efforts lead the perpetrators to increase their bullying exercises. Most of the bullies practice these activities to gain recognition from their peers and age groups. They believe that by bullying, they are more acknowledged even when they know that it is not ethical behaviour.

Effects of cyber-bullying

Cyber-bullying cause’s effects to the victims and also the perpetrators, the consequences may be of so many sorts, which include psychological and even mental effects.

Cyber-bullying leads the victim to increased stress, which could turn to depression in the case where there is continued exposer to bullying. Teenagers who have often experienced cyber bullying have been reported to end up suffering from depression. This stress affects their academics and works as most of the time; they are mentally disturbed, where they turn out to be socially isolated and lonely. In a study carried out in the US found out that 32% of victims who have faced depression have been traced with several signs and symptoms of stress. For the targets who were bullied online, they experienced severe chances of getting trauma symptomology, which could lead to mental illness.

Destruction of self-behaviour to the victims is another effect they include in the development of suicidal thoughts. In different researchers, scholars have proved that excessive threats to a human being can trigger suicidal thoughts, which could make an individual think of committing harmful acts. Cyber bullying is a dangerous encounter to the victims; it makes most of them have nervous habits as they live in fear due to repeated bullying. Another effect is most victims experience sleeping and appetite disorder, and different individuals respond differently when exposed to patronizing experiences like bullying. Most of them tend to lose their healthy appetite or even experience sleep disorders because of the mental disturbance these disorders affect individual health.

However, the perpetrators are also affected by the bullying activities. On of the effect is that is bullies continue to exercising cyber bully; they are prone to becoming delinquent and later in life be involved in dangerous criminal activities. When perpetrators are used to cyber-bullying, they can be quickly be promoted from being bullies to now engaging in hard-core delinquency. This ends up ruining the lives of so many teenagers as it affects their education and their relationship with their families.

Conclusion

Bullying can lead the perpetrators to engage in drug abuse as the act of harassing others also affected their emotional being, and they require drugs to give them more courage to carry out these unethical behaviours. Most bullies end up becoming addicts who change their lives; they also suffer from depression as they cannot concentrate on daily activities. Most perpetrators live with fear because they are not always sure that they cannot be identified, which could lead them to serious trouble.