Cyber Bullying Essay -- Technology, Real Perpetrators, Cyberbullying

Going to a new school in Massachusetts, all the way from Ireland, Phoebe Prince is ready to start a new life and make new friends. Not everything always workes out in her favor, though. As soon as Prince starts dating the star football player, the threats start flowing in. The constant torments at school leave her lonely and depressed, and when she got home, it never stopped. She was getting never ending text messages and the torments didn’t stop there. Phoebe was constantly getting harassed through social networking sites, such as Facebook. High school is supposed to be the time of her life, but she is only able to live one year of it because she takes her own life relentlessly. Cyber bullying is a problem that affects almost half of American teens (NCPC 1). Adult authorities should enact strict rules to protect vulnerable children from suffering the effects of the modern threat of cyber bullying. Although technology makes it difficult to identify the real perpetrator, the expansion of technology throughout the years has recently made cyber bullying a more prominent factor. From Myspace to Facebook to Formspring to Twitter, cyber bullying makes its way over the entire internet, and will not stop for anything. The rise of networking sites, personal Web pages and blogs brimming with the minutiae of teens antics and angst has helped to create a rich climate for cyber mayhem: Locker-room photos snapped with cell phones and broadcast on the Internet, fake profiles created on social-networking sites, salacious rumors spread in chat rooms, threats zapped across town in instant messages (Billitteri 4). They warn that young people on these sites are more likely to be the victims of cyber bullying and that they are also vulnerable to pr... ...y, has a very strict Internet usage policy with certain sites, like Myspace, blocked so students cannot access them (Cyber Bullying 3). Cyber bullying causes destruction to not only the victim’s life, but the loved ones of the victim as well. With the modern day technology that increases every day, cyber bullying will keep growing without the strict anti-bullying laws that need to be enforced not only in select states, but in all. Schools need to be more open-eyed to what children are doing during school hours and being strict that their acts don’t follow them home. Parents need to teach their children better habits and respectful manners so that when they are confronted with others, it is less likely they will be a bully to them. With all these minor improvements that can be made, cyber bullying can be diminished very easily if everyone helps out every day.