Tsuki wrote:And again you can just as easilly walk away from RL bullying and not let it effect your daily life by walking away from those bullying you or report it. It works both ways
.
Not always, it doesn't. I have to agree with Nick, here. It's a hell of a lot easier to avoid a website where you're being bullied than to get away from bullying IRL.
IRL bullying is usually much worse, because in addition to saying hurtful things, which are the same kind of things, IRL bullies can and do attack their victims physically. Some people are beaten to death by bullies, some of them children. An internet bully cannot beat you to death. Yes their words and actions can and do drive people to suicide and they are terrible, but so do IRL bullies, and it's not always possible to report them.
For instance here many gay teens are bullied, but reporting it gets them nowhere because the police and parents, etc. tend to treat them just as badly as the bullies do or worse. And what about when the bullies are the parents and police? What do they do then? Who do they report it to?
I have been bullied online and IRL too, online bullies can be pushed aside and blocked and gotten rid of. If they won't leave you alone online, you can create a new identity or just leave the website(/s) affected by them. However... I am currently living with a bully and I can't fight him and I can't get away from him. I made a thread about this creep in January of last year and have been mostly silent since then even though things have escalated in all this time. The stuff I talked about there is only the tip of the iceberg. If I fight him, I risk at the very best, a 6 year old (my cousin) never getting to see his favourite cousin again because this jerk manipulates the kid's mom, and at the very worst, I risk jail time. This guy is constantly doing things with the sole purpose of angering or hurting me, mentally or physically. You may think "why not just leave his house then" and the answer is because there's nowhere else I can go right now. I'm legally homeless and leaving his home will land me on the streets. I can't go to the police because he owes money on the house right now. If the police were to take him away, the house would be confiscated too unless we could somehow turn up enough money to pay it off and claim it as our own.
No online bully can put you in that situation.
Yes both kinds of bullies are bad. Yes cyber-bullies can be horrible and yes they can lead people to suicide. But in EVERY case of cyber-bullying, as long as you keep your home and personal details secret from the bullies, you can just GO AWAY and never deal with them again. That is not true of every IRL bully. Some people are bullied by siblings, parents, neighbors... some are bullied by the police.
I'm not downplaying cyber-bullying here, or saying that it isn't a problem. I'm just pointing out there is a difference, and with one you can always get away, while with the other, you sometimes can't.
. I was just stating that Cyber Bullying is still bullying and in some cases cannot be avoided (I had a rather bad case of it). But I still think both forms can be solved in similar ways. Not all the time but sometimes.
. I really am and I didn't mean offense. I guess people deal with bullying in different ways. I just find that with RL (with me anyway) it is a lot easier to report to say teachers or the police (which is what I did). Once they got involved the bullying stopped. But that's my experience anyway. And yup I have been bullied very badly due to my condition/disability so much so that I started to cut myself and stop taking my medication....so yes I know what RL bullying was. But once I spoke up and told people it stopped and my life got better. What I mean is with Cyber Bullying it can be a lot harder to trace the bully sometimes as what happened with me.