Cyber-bullying: What teens don't know about it
Opinion
Cyber-bullying kills
You are destroying yourself along with
those you defame
By David Serd : July 18, 2009.
A 14-year-old girl from Geelong in Australia killed herself yesterday after being bullied over the internet.
Chanelle Rae was the fourth student from Western Heights College in Geelong in Victoria to have committed suicide in the past 6 months.
Her devastated mother said Karen had been bullied over the internet last night, and the final threat was too much for her.
Cyber-bullying kills.
Two months ago, two teenage girls were kicked out of a leading independent girls' school in Sydney (Australia) after cyber-bullying other students.
Cyberbullying is when someone uses email, instant messaging, mobile phones, websites, or other information technology to deliberately defame, threaten, insult, or intimidate someone.
The two Year 9 girls, from the 123-year-old Ascham School, used the MySpace website to post hateful and slanderous comments about others at their school, according to Australia's ABC news service.
The girls commented on 31 Ascham girls, and included allegations of sexual misbehavior, drug taking, drinking, and relationships.
One of the authors boasted about making another girl's life hell by getting everyone to hate her. There were rumors and slurs about students' sexual activities as well as their alleged drug and alcohol habits. The comments accused one girl of giving sexual favors to multiple boys on the same day.
Like the problem with sexting, many teens — like these two — are either totally unaware or totally uncaring that there are laws and public standards against making libelous comments about someone else.
What teens need to know about cyber-bullying is that when they start spreading hateful and malicious comments that will damage someone's reputation, they are committing a criminal offense in most jurisdictions that may haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Even more seriously, they may be guilty of causing someone's death.
Cyber-bullying kills.
A tragic case took place in 2007. A boy befriended 13-year-old Megan Meier of Missouri on MySpace, and Megan fell for a cruel hoax. The Associated Press reported that after a few weeks the boy, or someone using the account, started sending cruel messages such as “Megan Meier is a slut. Megan Meier is fat.”
Megan was distraught. She couldn't understand why this was happening, and sank into depression. One day her mother found Megan's body slumped in a bedroom closet, a victim of suicide. Six weeks later, Megan's family found that the boy had never existed. It was a phoney account, created by a mother and daughter who knew Megan.
Cyberbullying kills!
Cyber-bullies are killing teens because the bullies have hearts that lack love, joy, peace, and goodness.
Making defamatory comments about people has always occurred, but before the invention of cell phones, websites, and such, these things were often just spoken, so it was one person's word against another's. Now the most cowardly cyberbullies try to hide online.
But teens who think that anything they commit to writing or pictures will be safe or kept private are simply gullible or stupid. And if you tell lies to damage someone's reputation you are breaking the law and risk imprisonment.
One of the Ten Commandments in the Bible is to not bear “false witness” — which means simply “don't tell lies about anyone.” Reputable governments around the world enforce laws against anyone who doesn't follow this rule. The offense is called defamation, slander, or libel.
If parents neglect to instil good values in their children, more people will get hurt as selfishness strangles their children's personalities. It takes only one generation of parents to ignore teaching their children God's values, and the information will be lost to future generations.
Even if the law doesn't get you, you will suffer consequences. You may be kicked out of school like the two teens above, or you may be subjected to unwanted media publicity, like the two girls above, or you may become an object of hatred yourself by those you defame, and by their parents and friends, like the two girls above.
Or you may be the cause of someone's death, like Karen Rae's or Megan Meier's.
What some teens don't know about cyberbullying is that taking part in it shows you are gullible or stupid. You may be the brightest kid in your class, but if you get involved in cyberbullying it is like pointing a gun at your head and another at your victim. Suddenly people realize you are a problem they don't want around.
Photo of young woman is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
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List of opinion articles.
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