Cyberbullying Vs Traditional Bullying

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” One hears this all the time. But, this saying is out of date with all the technologies and cyberbullying in today’s community. First, cyberbullies are “anonymous”/ have false identities compared to bullies. Second, there is no way to escape cyberbullies compares to bullies where one can escape. Third, there are “blind items” used with no names but everyone knows who it is that’s being targeted compared to bullies. Cyberbullying is a new form of bullying that is harder to identify in today’s society than the traditional bullying.

One either knows the identity of their bully/bullies or they don’t know. In traditional bullying, everyone knows who’s being the bully/bullies. For

The answer is yes and no. In traditional bullying, the victim can hide and get away from their bully/bullies. If they are not actually there, the bully can’t do anything. For example, “B” is the victim of “A”, he always hides when he sees “A” coming, “A” wouldn’t be able to do anything to “B”. On the other hand, cyberbullies can get you anywhere at anytime because they are bullying through technology. The fact shown by RCMP is: “It can follow a victim everywhere 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, from school, to the mall and all the way into the comfort of their home.” (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 2015 “Bullying and Cyberbullying”, para.5)This statistic shows that the victim of cyberbullying has no way of escaping at all, they are not even safe in their own home. Also, many people don’t speak up about being cyberbullied. “38% of online girls report being bullied, compared with 26% of online boys.” (Luke Gilkerson, 2012) This shows that only a small percentage of people actually report the cyberbullying that has been done to them. Therefore, it’s more troublesome to identify the cyberbullies compared to bullies because they bully so frequently the victim is scared to speak up about

In traditional bullying, there is a clear victim and that victim has “done” some “things” to make the bully wants to bully them. For example, “B” is ugly, “A” don’t likes it so he bullies “B”. On the other hand, cyberbullies use “blind items” with no name to target their victim and everyone else is posting there as well. “Other times, the account tweets blind items that transfix the school. ‘Everyone’s self-conscious about it.’ says one incoming junior at Hudson. ‘It always becomes, ‘Who was that confession about? Who sent that in? I want to know.’ It kind of controls the social aspect of the school.’”(Casey Newton, The Verge,2013, “Sex, lies, and subtweets: Ohio high school tormented by Twitter gossip”, para.3) This shows that blind items target a lot of people and a lot of people joins in after the cyberbullies post it. Therefore, it’s lot harder to identify the cyberbullies compared to bullies because the blind items are posted for excess amount of people to see and then other random people joins the cyberbullies