Awareness: Cyber Harassment
I recently wrote about Cyber Harassment on my personal blog called Millennial Garden. I don’t see a lot of talk about Cyber Harassment in the Gen Y blogs so I thought it would be a good topic to discuss. The following is a high-level overview, which identifies the terms Cyber Bullying, Cyber Stalking, and Cyber Harassment. Please leave your thoughts on this social blogging issue. If you have a story to share to raise awareness, please leave feedback in the comments.
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.
Do you have a Cyber Harassment story to share with us to help raise awareness on this issue?
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