Cyber Hate
High-Level Overview of Cyberbullying, Cyber Harassment, and Cyber Stalking
What is Cyber Bullying?
Cyber Bullying is terminology that describes the harassment of or by a child or teenager on the internet. There’s a website that talks more about this called Stop Stop Cyberbullying. Visit here to learn about what a cyber bully is, prevention techniques, and how to take action.
What is Cyber Stalking?
Cyber stalking or cyberstalking is online harassment. Cyberstalkers use the internet or electronic methods to intimidate or harass. Not every conflict on the internet is cyberstalking. An offensive email, blog, chat, or argument is not necessarily harassment.
Overview from The National Center for Victims of Crime
Cyberstalking is a relatively new phenomenon. With the decreasing expense and thereby increased availability of computers and online services, more individuals are purchasing computers and “logging onto” the Internet, making another form of communication vulnerable to abuse by stalkers.
Cyberstalkers target their victims through chat rooms, message boards, discussion forums, and e-mail. Cyberstalking takes many forms such as: threatening or obscene e-mail; spamming (in which a stalker sends a victim a multitude of junk e-mail); live chat harassment or flaming (online verbal abuse); leaving improper messages on message boards or in guest books; sending electronic viruses; sending unsolicited e-mail; tracing another person’s computer and Internet activity, and electronic identity theft.
Similar to stalking off-line, online stalking can be a terrifying experience for victims, placing them at risk of psychological trauma, and possible physical harm. Many cyberstalking situations do evolve into off-line stalking, and a victim may experience abusive and excessive phone calls, vandalism, threatening or obscene mail, trespassing, and physical assault.
What type of people cyber harass?
According to Wired Safety,
Cyberstalkers are often driven by revenge, hate, anger, jealousy, obsession and mental illness. While a cyberharasser may be motivated by some of these same feelings, often the harassment is driven by the desire to frighten or embarrass the harassment victim.
Sometimes the harasser intends to teach the victim a lesson in netiquette or political correctness (from the harasser’s point of view). Often the cyberharassment victim is merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, or has made a comment or expressed an opinion that the cyberharasser dislikes. We have even seen cases where the victim is merely being targeted because they are the first ones the cyberharasser encounters when they are in a “bad mood.
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3 Responses to “Cyber Hate”
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I think the main things to consider are (1) the intent of the perceived bully and (2) the reaction of the possible victim. In my experience, people who bully online lack social skills, confidence and other qualities needed to get along in real-world social situations. The anonymity of an online persona makes them feel bold and powerful. They don’t have to come up with responses on the spot, worry about facial expressions, body language, inappropriate reactions (like laughter) and they feel they’re in control of the exchange. For example, if you respond, they’ve “got you” or if they chose to end the exchange, they “win.”
I don’t think a lot can be done about them except to ignore them. In some cases, I think you can call them out, which tends to at least stop the active harassment. There are also a lot of lawyers and psychologists who specialize in this kind of thing. I know of some lawyers in Erie who have taken on cyberstalking and cyberbullying cases, if you need to feel more secure.
This is always an excellent discussion to have publicly. What gives the bullies strength is the idea that you might not fight back. Good for you for keeping this on your front page.
BTW: I’d gotten away from reading you & now I’m back on a daily check
June 22nd, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Thanks, Eden. I hope to have interesting content. I’m juggling publishing a few blogs so it’s hard to keep up with them all the time
I’m also back on the EB browser so it will be easier.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:40 am
I took a class on cyber crime at EUP in my last semester. I have learned that cyberstalking/bullying are two of the hardest crimes to prove and to legally punish. The hardest part of proving it is that there is a lot of hearsay evidence involved. In once case that I have dealt with personally, a single person found multiple blogs, message boards, and chat spots that I actively participate in and used the posts to cause problems within my family. Just recently she, in her own personal blog, completely slandered my character calling me various names and publicly posting blatant lies about me.
In some cases it is easily ignored, most adults just let it go. The problem arises in adolescents that then have to deal with this behavior outside of an internet arena. This is where cyberstalking and bullying become dangerous and where actions against the poster should be taken. Because while it may be easy to bully from behind a keyboard repercussions in school or social circles can be extremely damaging.
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