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Essay on The Growing Epidemic of Cyberbullying

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Cyber bullying has been around since the creation of advanced communication technology. In the last few years, however, this issue has become more common, more related to sex and most of all more dangerous. It has gotten so dangerous that children have killed each other and/or committed suicide after having been involved in a cyber bullying incident. Little attention and support from school authorities, more access to computers, and the latest cool thing (social networks) are all factors that have contributed to the rising of cyber-bullying practices. Cyber bullying is when a preteen or teen is harassed, threatened, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise molested by another child with the use of technology such as internet, …show more content…

Such audience could then turn bullying into verbal bullying or even continue the cyber bullying making it a bigger threat for the victim. By now the victim is already scared to death and psychologically abused. In a lot of cases the abuse escalates to physical abuse. Third characteristic is prevalent sexual and homophobic harassment. Sexual and homophobic harassment is emerging as one of the main reasons a person is bullied. This one not only concentrates on the sexual orientation of the person, but also touches unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. A fourth aspect is that only communications have a permanence and inseparability that are very difficult to erase. For example cell phones are usually carried all the time which makes it difficult for the victim to ignore the message. Teenagers spend a lot of time in their computers which also makes it difficult to ignore emails. Emails are very powerful because they can contain defamatory material or modified pictures and it can be send to us many people as you want. In this characteristic, we can include social networking sites such as My Space, Face book, Hi 5, and many others. Online communication tools such as the ones previously mentioned for pre-teens and teenagers began to function approximately 5 years ago and became extremely popular. Especially for girls that like to engage in more social and verbal forms of communication. These sites were

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