I know what you're thinking after reading the title of this article: "She's trying to discredit the real pain that victims of cyber-bullying go through!" And let's be clear right off the bat here: No I'm not, so take a chill pill. I know that cyber-bullying has real victims that feel real pain, and that bullying via cyberspace is significantly harder to escape from than the face-to-face variety. But here is my proposal for why this problem hasn't been fixed yet, and why I don't believe that it ever really will be: As a society, we are all just a bunch of shitty human beings at our core.
Bullying, in general, has been around since humanity first learned that making someone else feel like shit could make you feel superior to them. A common stigma is that bullies only exist in the world of children in school, especially high school age kids. But anyone that has ever attended college or has worked at a job where there are other people around you know that this isn't true. Instead of being pushed around by the big kid on the playground with self-esteem issues, were now subjected to rumors and stories told in confidence being spread. So basically we're still stuck in high school.
I don't believe that the motivations and primary goals that bullies have have changed much over the years, the emerging of social media has just given them a faster and more convenient outlet with which to carry out their deeds. I'm not trying to justify the behavior, but if we as a society haven't been able to rid playgrounds of bullying, how is it possible to make any dent in a form that allows for anonymity of the abusers and messages and images to be spread in a matter of seconds? If you want to lower the occurrences of cyber-bullying, you need to first lower what causes bullying in general: us being allowed to be shitty people to one another.
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