Cyberbullying on Adolescents: Risks and Recommendations

State of Victoria
ISSUE COVER SHEET
Issue: Cyberbullying is a major issue that is constantly on the rise in current time. This issue mainly
involves harassing or threatening an individual through digital media for various purposes. While
some of these incidents are mainly executed for prank purpose, most of them have some serious
implications and have serious impacts on the victims of the bullying. As the current days’ children
are more exposed to digital media than a decade ago, they are becoming easy targets of the
cyberbullies and some extreme cases of cyberbullying are even resulting in suicidal tendencies of the
adolescents.
Background: Cyberbullying has always been a major issue since the advent of social media. With
rapid increase of popularity of social media among people, the use of virtual media enabled the
bullies to attack selected victims through the media for fulfilling certain purposes like blackmail,
threatening, orders and others. In the last five to six years, more and more adolescents have been
exposed to the social media through smartphones and as a result, the cyberbullies have made the
adolescents more likely targets that the adults. This is mainly because the adolescents have low
understanding of the issue and believe everything they are told. The adolescents often obey the
bullies’ instructors without the knowledge of their parents and lead to serious implications like
major injury, suicide and others.
Comment: In spite of growing issue of cyberbullying on the adolescents, serious attention has still
not been given to address the problem and save the lives of the adolescents. Furthermore, the
parents themselves are giving their adolescent children unlimited access to digital media that is the
root cause of this particular problem.
Recommendations: It is recommended that the Ministry for Health, Victoria should bring two main
policies to stop this problem: 1) Block access to social media websites for children below the age of
18, 2) Monitor the online activities of the boys and girls who are accessing the social media to
determine who are interacting with them through the internet
Name:[write here]
Date:[write here]
Readers:The Hon. Jill Hennessy MP, Minister for Health, Victorian Government
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State of Victoria
Purpose
The term “cyberbullying” mainly refers to mental harassment of an individual through digital media
that also may result or imply to physical harm of the targeted individual. The adolescents are most
likely to fall prey to these bullies as they have low understanding of the issue and due to their young
age, they are easy to exploit mentally. The brief has been developed to focus on the key risks that
occur from cyberbullying on the adolescents and based on the analysis, policy recommendations
have been developed that are aimed to control and minimize the issue highlighted.
Background
The main cyberbullying issue has been significantly on the rise since the increase in popularity of
social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and others. Since the entire social media concept is
based on virtual media, bullying is much easier since the victims are not able to identify or the
location of the bullies. As a result, the bullying results in various effects on the victim such as fear,
mental trauma, insecurity and others. The adult victims may not always fall prey to these bullies as
they can incident to the report to the relevant authority. However, for the adolescent, this is not the
case. Once the cyberbully has successfully targeted a particular individual, it will perform several
bully tricks on the adolescent people such that they believe them and are forced to perform
physically harmful activities. For instance, in a recent social media “game” named the “Blue Whale”,
the bully first earned the trust of the victim and then ordered them to perform certain self harm
activity (Lupariello et al., 2018). The bully also threatened the victim that unless he is performing
every activity, the bully will take serious actions like killing his parents and others. The blue whale
“game” was specifically designed that in the last stage of it, the victim will have to commit suicide.
As a result of this game, thousands of adolescent children have fallen prey around the around and
have ultimately committed suicide. Similar other “games” like “Momo” and others have also popped
up from time to time in various countries of the world. Considering the trend of these incidents,
which is on the rise by a significant percentage, it is important to turn attention to this particular
issue to save the lives of the adolescent people.
Based on the study of the researchers who have worked on cyberbullying, two main points can be
highlighted and described. These are as follows.
Increasing Access of Social Media Websites: According to a study by Khattar et al. (2018), it has
been found that in the last ten years, the number of adolescent people using the social media has
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