Cyberbullying:A pandemic in its own time.

 

Cyber-bullying: A pandemic in its own time.

Quite often we have seen instances of aggression from an individual or group on other(s) in schools, colleges, workplaces, etc. and acknowledge them as bullying.  With today’s effect of technology, we have also begun to see this behavior online on various social media platforms and as early as in the year 2000 the term cyber-bullying was coined.

We are all aware of what goes on behind bullying. The need to showcase power by down grading a peer and other psychological reasons for the bully, how the bullied lives the rest of his life in various post traumatic disorders, so on and so forth. But what we fail to talk to about is the extent to which this culture has spread or an effective way to stop this. With the pandemic and everyone being confined to their homes, it’s a fact that the only out we have to the external world is through the internet. And that has in turn shown a surge in the number of cyber bullying crimes reported. One must understand how easy this is too. Anyone with a smart device and an internet connection can both be a bully and be bullied. You no longer have to be strong or popular or even cool to inflict suffering on another individual. The anonymity of the same also adds on to the ease with which anyone can say anything to anybody else.

Well all of this is more or less of what we know already. In fact we all know a lot more. But what are we doing about stopping it? How are we monitoring it? Are the existing laws punishing the offenders? If not, what more needs to be done? There are so many questions and how do we come up with the answers? What structure of thinking through these issues would help us find a solution that would help curb the issue at its roots?

 I’m sure many of you would have your own opinions on the situation, but here is mine. Before talking about the course of law or the even the policing on these issues, we must talk about why a very small percentage of the same is reported? Why aren’t most of the cases even brought to light? It could be either that the bullied does not raise voice in fear of being morally policed for the content he/she has put out there. Or even when brought to the light the issue is subdued to protect the name or status of the person or his/her family. The reasons are endless. Making people aware of how victim blaming often takes the blame from the one who has committed the crime is as important as making sure the one who has committed the crime has to be punished in response to the severity of the crime. This would, more often than not, require very uncomfortable conversations and social cleansing so as to speak. Another issue being, the number of these instances that we can see today. Under every public post we can at least see about 1000 comments of aggression and hatred. How to keep track or even police them? Is it feasible to bring each and everyone in and punish them for the same?

This is just the beginning of the conversation that has to take place with respect to the stopping cyber bullying along with how to get people to stop bullying in the first place. These in turn might branch out to other areas that would need to be spoken about, who knows? We will once we start the conversation, and I hope that happens very soon.

-SHWETA SATHEESH