Lawanna Brock Talks About Cyberbullying

There is a new bully on the playground. You can’t see him, you can’t even hear his voice, but he is an ominous presence nevertheless. This research proposal will allow the reader to gain a better insight to this complex and disturbing social problem known as cyberbullying. Other terminology used to describe cyberbullying include online social cruelty, cyber-victimization, electronic bullying, and online harassment. Lawanna Brock says that bullying can be defined as a form of aggression that occurs when an individual or group intimidates, excludes, harasses, or mistreats, another or others, directly through physical or verbal assault or indirectly through threats, insults, isolation, destruction, or theft of belongings, etc. The Cyberbullying Research Center authors define cyberbullying as “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices.” Other researchers say it is “an aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself.”This involves bullying via electronic communication tools such as email, cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), instant messaging or the World Wide Web.

Research by psychologists reveal seven categories of cyberbullying actions. These include:

(1) Flaming: This involves sending angry, rude, vulgar messages about a person to an online group or to that person via email or other text messaging.

(2) Online harassment: This includes repeatedly sending offensive messages via email or other text messaging to a person.

(3) Cyberstalking: This is the online harassment that includes threats of harm or is excessively

intimidating.

(4) Denigration (put-downs):  This involves sending harmful, untrue, or cruel statements about a person to other people or posting such material online.

(5) Masquerade: This is when one is pretending to be someone else and sending or posting material that makes that person look bad.

(6) Outing: This includes sending or posting material about a person that contains sensitive, private, or embarrassing information, including forwarding private messages or images.

(7) Exclusion: This involves cruelly excluding someone from an online group.

It is clear that adults who work with school-age children and adolescents should take all forms of harassment seriously and assist in the development of a society that realizes the maltreatment associated with cyberbullying behavior. Lawanna Brock found that thirty-six states have passed legislation related to bullying but only 6 of these include specific statutes related to electronic bullying. These states include Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, South Carolina, and Washington. Certain researchers believes that the legal “legal tangle” that deters this legislation involves defining of the line between freedom of expression with First Amendment rights and the protection of the well-being of those being defamed. The emotional impact of this social problem could result in long-term psychosocial effects in both the cyberbully victims and the cyberbullies. With the elimination of prayer and biblical teachings from our school systems, our future leaders and societal contributors of tomorrow are left without guidance of what is right and what is wrong. The results of this study, as in the research outcomes found by Lawanna Brock, would provide further evidence to support how cyberbullying contributes to a worsened mental health state for those victimized and allow for cyberbullies to receive necessary attention to redirect their aggression and deter progression of their criminal behavior. In other words, children and adolescents are practicing for later-in-life roles. Preventing development of psychosocial problems could in turn prevent cyberbully victims from mental deterioration and cyberbullies from becoming aggressive adults.