Why is Cyberbullying so hard to fight?
New here? You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
You may have noticed that in the relatively short time I’ve published my blog that I have frequently talked about cyberbullying here. This topic really hits home with me. It’s such a personal attack on someone. How can someone be so vindictive—so hateful—to another human being? Surely there are more productive things we should be doing with our time and talents.
I’ve read quite a few articles before about cyberbullying, but rarely have I seen one that really gets into the details of what it’s like to be the target of someone else’s hatred and poor judgement.
David Knight is the victim written about in this article. I really feel for this guy. He’s just a teenager trying to fit in, but there are other students, students who are weak and cowards who don’t want him to fit in. So much was their hatred for him that someone decided it was entirely appropriate to publish a Web site about how much they hate him and say so many mean things about him. The pain David went through must have been unbearable.
Imagine for a moment that you walk into a room filled with people. Some or maybe all of them bear some form of hateful attitude toward you. The tension in the room is thick. They don’t want you there, and you don’t want to be there because they don’t want you there. You don’t know why they’re sending such negative vibes toward you. It’s almost like they know a secret about you, and the only person in the room that doesn’t know it is you.
Wouldn’t that make you feel just a little stressed? Wouldn’t that make you feel isolated from everyone else? In any case, it doesn’t make for a heathy environment or a healthy you.
Another thing that troubles me in this article is that there was so much resistance from the ISP before they complied with the parent’s pleas to take the site down. The ISP even had a policy against posting offensive material. I’m sorry, but even the most casual observer could plainly see that this was clearly offensive.
Jeffrey Shallit, a spokesman for the Electronic Frontier, has a very callous opinion of the whole matter. He says, “…we are sending students really the wrong message” when he talked about rejecting the idea of censoring another person’s comments about someone else just because the targeted person doesn’t like it. That’s pretty cold, if you ask me.
You see, it’s my opinion that today’s society is spending way too much time speaking out without giving a thought to how their words are taken. Freedom of speech doesn’t equate to freedom to offend in my book. By the same token, we shouldn’t be so caught up in being politically correct either, but that’s for another post. 
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I was watching television one night a couple of weeks ago and saw on the O’Reily Factor a girl who was being victimized by cyberbullying tactics. Awful!
Recently, at my daughter’s school, there was an incident of some students who basically took turns sending messages to their friends about a new student who simply didn’t do anything to deserve such treatment; nobody deserves to be treated this way.
All this to say that bullying in any form is very real and we’ve got to do something to get kids to stop.