Don’t Stay Oblivious to Cyberbullying!

That should be a moral imperative for each of us in order to raise awareness and start a dialogue with those who are silent victims of cyberbullying.

There are neither rules nor best practices to learn and follow when it comes to cyberbullying. Only those who directly or indirectly experience it, know what it means.

Anyone, anywhere, anytime may become victim of online bullying.

Information sharing over the internet is so effortlessly interwoven with daily life that connectivity is anywhere and anytime, and so online bullying is.

According to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, fully 73% of adult internet users have seen someone to be harassed online and 40% have personally experienced it.

Thus, four-in-ten internet users are victims of online harassment as target of at least one of the following behaviours:

• 27% have been called offensive names
• 22% have had someone try to purposefully embarrass them
• 8% have been physically threatened
• 7% have been harassed for a long period
• 6% have been sexually harassed.

Cyberbullying as well as bullying remains a social plague that cannot be estinguish, ingrained as it is in our human nature.

The internet in only a place where evil of human nature can spread its contagion and go viral.

No boundaries apply to human nature, no rules can restrict it, no one has the power to prevent the spiral of evil from within but everyone should be called to do something as main stakeholder of societal wellbeing.

All humans may become victims, and everyone may witness as a bystander as in the picture below.

Young people are particularly likely to witness all types of online harassment.

Somewhere, there are some of our brothers and sisters who precisely now need our help.

In all circumstances, knowing how to react to bullying and how to stop the abuse can help someone else or reduce someone else’s pain.

Don’t Stay Oblivious to Cyberbullying!

But nobody should conceive online bullying simply as a generic “homo homini lupus” principle because when it comes to bullying, differently from any other fight, there is always only one wolf or there are some wolves attacking someone who is not a wolf being by far the least helpless and vulnerable creature with an enormous power imbalance compared with the wolves harassing him.

Of those who have been harassed online, 55% (22% of all internet users) have experienced the less severe forms while the rest (18% of all internet users) have fallen victim to any of the more severe kinds of harassment.

Half the times the identity of perpetrators is unknown. That fact enhances the difficulty of any help to victims.

And the victim has often no idea about how he or she can stop the violence.

A large proportion (60%) of those who have experienced it ignored the violence whereas 40% took actions to contrast it by changing username, deleting their own profile, unfriending or blocking the bully, reporting to the website, discussing the incident online or withdrawn from an online forum. Only 5% reported law enforcement while a larger part (47%) confronted the person online.

Online incidents have always an emotional impact, no matter the severity, the kind of harassment and the type of response or action needed to face them.

Any harassment can be very or extremely upsetting and it is side effects may be long lasting and may severely impact reputation.

Institutions, organizations, schools and parents, all together, can do a lot to raise awareness and help victims to overcome the worst consequences.

Institutions, organizations, businesses and any other social partner have an indirect responsibility to promote lawful conducts and reinforce the dissemination of positive values, not only in the offline but also in the online.

Parents, families and teachers have the immediate and direct responsibility towards their children which is enabled only by an ongoing dialogue expecially when children are teens or tweens.

Dialogue doesn’t mean to find a certain solution or the right key to a problem. And it also doesn’t mean the absence of conflict in every case. The real meaning of dialogue is to have an immediate interest and to pay immediate attention to something that cannot be faced alone, even if it would mean dealing with an eventual conflict in order to help someone in difficulty.

Dialogue means not to stay oblivious to cyberbullying.

Dialogue doesn’t really exclude any conflict but it’s a necessary condition to unleash empathy and show promptness to address problems at their first appearance.

Dialogue also means supervision, listening, care, attention, love. It means to have a great sensibility and acumen to perceive, to notice and to realize even alarm bells which are only early signals when something is heavy going down.

Dialogue always begins with listening and goes on with sharing. By listening and sharing it also progressively enables the relationship.

No relationship is possible without dialogue. And that is extremely true within the family and at school.

Refuse staying oblivious to cyberbullying, start a dialogue now with those in need.

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Bullying is the mirror of the bad health of our society, communities and definitely schools.

The growing isolation and egoism of humans has led to a total lack of interest in one another and ever-greater alienation. Indeed, alienation is the consequence of insecurity, vulnerability, fear, mistrust and suspicion toward the others.

Alienation, along with the persisting financial crisis and its serious consequences in terms of job insecurity, has increased uncertainty and caused the fall of every positive role model, thus contributing to the decline of families, the annihilation of every human possibility of redemption or simply of every change needed to improve living conditions.

Together with inequality and social unjustice, alienation has also built a shared perception of an ever-greater impoverishment of social capital.

Everyone lives apart from the others, alone, close in a predominant particularism, walking in a solitary landscape, in a defensive individualistic closeness, far from any contact and relationship with the collectivity whatever it is.

We are living in times of exponentially widespread solitary socialization where there is no space to recovery time or attention for another human in trouble or in needs. In such a world there is neither space for solidarity nor space for do-able responsibility to overcome indifference.

And the consequence is that the stronger prevails over the weaker while the majority just bystand.

This is true everywhere, in the larger as well as in the smaller communities, in the workplaces as well as schools. Things are always the same, things aren’t different in the smaller level as if we stay at the mirror: they reflect exactly what happens at a larger or bigger level.

There is no space for empathy. Every group, and thus every collectivity reflects the same dynamics.

But Jeremy Rifkin foreshadows about the rise of the Age of Empathy, where he imagines the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis, under the sign of an empathy-altruism able to move it towards an empathic civilization.

What is empathy? Empathy is the opposite of bullying.

Empathy is about altruism, generosity, gratitude and compassion.

Empathy is about being humans, which means building and maintaining human relationships. This is empathy.

No empathy is possible without human relationships. All humans must be emphatic to each others.

There is empathy when everyone rediscovers the sense of his/her existence in a dialectic relationship with the entire group and the others’ lives and perceives his/her own inclusion as a dialectic mechanism intrinsically necessary and vital to the total entity existence as the group itself is.

It’s the superior interest of the combination and integration of single elements that is worth striving for, since it also enables that every single element’s individuality coexists and takes part to the collectivity entity without destroying the single elements, but by strengthening and empowering them.

In bullying it’s evident that human relationship doesn’t exist. What is common in all events of bullying it’s the absence of every relationship.

There is no perception of the severity of commitment to violence or to indifference, no conscience of offence, sin, guilt, and once such conscience emerges, it’s always too late and after a long way run.

The evil is everywhere, even masked as normality.

So bullying is everywhere even masked as ordinary behaviour.

Bullying is ordinary evil. Bystanding is the same.

All those who stay silent are guilty, no exceptions. None of them really cares about human relationship.

The internal code of every bullying event is the fact that the other doesn’t exist and there is always for everyone a turning point with a very hard juncture: to accept the group’s rule and become a group’s member as gregary or on the contrary to refuse, to dissent, to diverge from the group and become the group’s target as the enemy to be ostracized from the group itself.

Empathy and its relationship-related focus is a lifelong lesson that should be taught in all schools in order to prevent or fight bullying.

It’s always more effective to intervene within the group internal dynamics in order to promote a collective answer by valuing, teaching and instilling the value of relationship and empathy rather than stigmatising the single role, responsibility or psychology involved in order to find a psychological reason to bad behaviours as well as bullying.

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