The Impact of Cyberbullying on Mental Well-being: A Report

Desklib provides past papers and solved assignments for students. This report analyzes cyberbullying's impact on mental health.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
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Table of Contents
Introduction..............................................................................................................................................2
LO1 Construction of an argument...........................................................................................................2
LO2 Position within the argument...........................................................................................................3
LO3 Real case scenario............................................................................................................................3
Conclusion and Recommendation...........................................................................................................4
Reference List..........................................................................................................................................5
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Introduction
The current era of digitalization is mainly powered by the internet facility. This internet
facility has been successful in significantly decreasing the distance between two individuals
living far away from each other. In fact, in reality such individuals might be separated from
each other by their respective physical boundaries. This cyber world has some positive
aspects as well as some negative aspects. This report discusses one of the most sensitive
issues prevalent in the internet. This issue is the cyber bullying. The entire report argues
against cyber bullying. The report recommends some of the essentials for the eradication of
this cyber bullying. In this context, an unfortunate real life case scenario has been selected.
LO1 Construction of an argument
One of the most unfortunate outcomes of the internet is Cyber bullying. This cyber bullying
is defined as the means of harassing an individual by using digital media platforms. This term
is also known as Online Bullying. This has become rampant with the advancements of the
several digital platforms. The electronic devices predominantly used for cyber bullying are
the mobile phones, laptop, tablets and many others. In addition to this, the applications used
for the purpose are Text Messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Social Media
Applications such as facebook, instagram and many other such applications. The process of
cyber bullying is the procedure of sending inappropriate contents to the sender, posting
offensive and false information to malign an individual and many others (Pyżalski and
Poleszak, 2019:186). One of the most harmful cyber bullying instances is when false
information’s are posted about an individual along with the photo of that individual. This is
because; such instances directly affect the dignity of that individual. In fact, in such cases, the
truth of the information’s that have been posted is seldom verified. In this context, the
situated takes a dangerous turn in case the photo of an individual having absolutely no
connection with the posted information is spread. This individual may not have any idea of
such posts about oneself getting circulated (Sun et al. 2016:2). On the contrary, this
individual gets harassed by others for no actual fault. Furthermore, it has been observed that
prolonged cyber bullying has caused many suicides among the younger generation. This is
because; the younger generation has the lack of maturity to handle the cyber bullying
scenarios.
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LO2 Position within the argument
The mere mention of the word cyber bullying causes many individuals to get afraid. This
indicates that these individuals are morally affected to the extent possible. Cyber bullying
takes place as early as school going children to the matured office executives. Such
individuals after being cyber bullied at a very tender age are unable to cope with any funny
situations (Khan et al. 2018:17). This is because, to them these otherwise funny scenarios
seems to be a painful one. All these due to their prior history of being cyber bullied at one
point of time or the other. The worst case in this context is the individuals who went to the
extent of suicide attempting. This nightmarish memory of suicide attempting continues to
haunt them at every now and then of their life. They fail to focus on their work. Also, these
individuals lack the courage to take up any amount of risk in any situation. Risk taking is
considered to be one of the most crucial steps in the way of establishing something
significant (Fryling et al. 2015:10). Thus, these individuals maybe in their entire lifetime fail
to establish something significant. Also, due to decrease in the level of self-esteem, the
individuals fail to stand up for themselves as and when required.
LO3 Real case scenario
In this context of cyber bullying, an unfortunate real life accident took place few years back.
In this case, the victim was a fourteen year old Carney Bonner from UK. The victim was
harassed by means of popular social media, facebook. He was not mature enough at that age
to handle any instance of cyber bullying (Hinduja and Patchin, 2015:2016). This was the
opportunity exploited by the cyber bully. The cyber bully had reportedly created a false
account with a fake name in the facebook for the purpose of bullying. The bully resolved into
sending demoralizing text messages to the victim. Such disturbing messages significantly
affected the self-esteem of the victim. Being threatened with dire consequences if the victim
attempts to speak up, the victim chose to silently endure the harassment. This resulted in the
prolonged cyber bullying of the victim. This prolonged cyber bullying thereby forced the
victim to take the drastic step of slitting his wrist with a sharp object (bbc.com, 2011).
In the beginning, the victim had indeed ignored the messages as some bad joke. But with
days the messages turned out to be abusing enough to affect the self esteem of the victim. The
victim later on recalled the messages to be destroying his self-confidence, self-morality and
many others personal aspects (Zhong et al. 2016:3955). Luckily for him, the injury caused
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due to the slitting was observed by one of his friends and thus got reported. Otherwise,
according to him, he was heading into something worse than that.
This real life case ended with identification of the bully and the subsequent punishment. The
shocking outcome of this case is that the bully turned out to be a friend of the victim. The
victim in his upcoming years grew up to be a Cyber Mentor to help other bullying victims to
cope up with such situations.
Conclusion and Recommendation
Any case about the cyber bullying is an unfortunate incident for the victim as well as the
bully. This is because the victim gets badly affected whereas the bully thinks that he/she can
get away in such cases. These bullies in future become merciless criminals. Thus it can be
concluded from this case study that any form of cyber bullying must not be encouraged.
Rather all the cyber bullying incidents must be reported to the concerned authority for them
to take the necessary steps.
In order to curb the issue of cyber bullying, it is recommended that all the individuals remain
alert as to whom they are interacting with on the social media platforms and what they share
with them. Also, the bullies must be made to understand that they can in no way get away
with their instances of bullying the victim. They are bound to be caught as quickly as
possible.
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Reference List
bbc.com. 2011. 'I slit my wrists because I was cyber-bullied' Available at
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-12619440 [Accessed on 06/03/2019]
Fryling, M., Cotler, J., Rivituso, J., Mathews, L. and Pratico, S., 2015. Cyberbullying or
normal game play? Impact of age, gender, and experience on cyberbullying in multi-player
online gaming environments: Perceptions from one gaming forum. Journal of Information
Systems Applied Research, 8(1), pp.4-15.
Hinduja, S. and Patchin, J.W., 2015. Cyberbullying legislation and case law. Implications for
School Policy and Practice. Pridobljeno, 5, p.2016.
Khan, S., Balakrishnan, V. and Yee, N.K., 2018. Multiple Feature Enhanced Cyberbullying
Detection Model. In Data Science Research Symposium 2018 (p. 17).
Pyżalski, J. and Poleszak, W., 2019. 3.4. Peer violence and cyberbullying prevention
programmes. Prevention in school, p.186.
Sun, S., Fan, X. and Du, J., 2016. Cyberbullying Perpetration: A Meta-Analysis of Gender
Differences. International Journal of Internet Science, 11(1).
Zhong, H., Li, H., Squicciarini, A.C., Rajtmajer, S.M., Griffin, C., Miller, D.J. and Caragea,
C., 2016, July. Content-Driven Detection of Cyberbullying on the Instagram Social Network.
In IJCAI (pp. 3952-3958).
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