Abstract
Digital communication has revolutionized the way children interact and maintain social relations. However, not every tween (8-12 years) or teen (13-18 years) is able to take full advantage of digital media and may cross personal and social boundaries causing distress, mostly to their own friends at school and beyond. This results in adverse health effects for both the cyberbullying perpetrator and the victim. Articles reviewed on elementary school children and adolescents, collected from two different databases, showed that the number of elementary school kids using smartphones has more than doubled in the past few years. Given this rise, the risk of cyberbullying has also increased. Not all elementary school kids have the required media literacy to understand that their friends have equal rights in the virtual world as they do in the schoolyard. Regardless, they still carry a smartphone with data, use computers, and other electronic media to bully, embarrass, exclude, or humiliate others, often through social networking sites. Moving from tweens to teens seems to worsen the cyberbully behavior and choices, with middle school kids facing the highest cyberbullying incidents followed by high school kids and then the elementary school kids. The anonymity of cyberspace and the perceived lack of consequences seems to embolden the cyberbully. Identifying the mindset of a cyberbully and those at high risk of becoming a cyberbully can help target intervention efforts where they are needed the most and prevent cyberbullying.
Highlights
BackgroundAccess to digital media has revolutionized communication, changed social interactions, and presented new challenges everywhere for children, parents, teachers, researchers, and policymakers in the form of cyberbullying
Cyberbullying is an expression of violence using electronic media that can cause adverse mental health effects
Cyberbullying trends are highest in middle schools followed by high schools, and by elementary schools [12]
Summary
BackgroundAccess to digital media has revolutionized communication, changed social interactions, and presented new challenges everywhere for children, parents, teachers, researchers, and policymakers in the form of cyberbullying. Tweens and teens used information communication technology like computers and smartphones to bully, embarrass, exclude, or humiliate others. This aggression is performed using media such as online games, social media forums, online chat-rooms, instant messaging applications, video chats, and text messaging, etc. The online realm is perceived as anonymous and invisible, and it offers a lack of personal boundaries. Punishment, repercussions, and consequences of these actions are thought of as slim in the virtual world. This sets precedence to toxic online disinhibition resulting in hatred, threats, rude language use, lack of empathy, and lessened self-control [3]. The lifetime experiences of cyberbullying in the proportion of people have more than doubled (18% to 37%) from 2007 to 2019, and this issue has become a major public health problem affecting tweens and teens [4,5]
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