Cole Mayer

When I was young, bullying was not much of a problem. I did not start wearing glasses until middle school and my short height was not apparent until about the same age. I surrounded myself with friends while at school, so no one bothered to bully me after middle school.

But what if the bullies had attacked me on a social networking website? With a recent epidemic of teen suicides, such attacks have been brought to the forefront of media. The relentless, sometimes anonymous cyberbullying is far worse than the traditional face-to-face bullying.

Juliana Raskauskas, a child development professor, has studied both traditional bullying and cyberbullying.

“My research indicates that being cyberbullied is associated with low academic performance, low connection to school and depressive symptoms,” Raskauskas said.

She said while the effects of cyberbullying sound much like traditional bullying, they have the potential to be much worse. Cyber-bullies have 24-hour access to their victims.

This makes the bully, what the denizens of the Internet would call, an “Internet tough guy,” said Kennedy Youmans, junior music education major.

“(The bully) is just trying to feel strong over the Internet,” he said.

Raskauskas said cyber-bullies feed from the sense that the victims have no escape from torment.

One of Raskauskas’ studies showed that those who encountered both styles of bullying had “significantly higher depressive symptoms” than those only bullied by either in-person or cyberbullying alone.

While I have not been cyberbullied, I was bullied by one guy in middle school for a while, who made fun of my height, intelligence and verbose speech style. I cannot imagine having it happen all day and every day.

“We know from the research that students’ sexual orientation is the most common area of attack for bullies in adolescence,” Raskauskas said. “Homosexual teens are more at risk for being targeted for traditional bullying.”

Recently, Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after a video of him engaged in sexual conduct with another man appeared on the Internet. Clementi had not yet opened up to others about his sexuality.

Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, allegedly enlisted the help of classmate Molly Wei to videotape Clementi and then posted the video online because he was against Clementi’s sexual orientation.

This is infuriating because Ravi could have dealt with this in other peaceful ways.

With Facebook, college students are connected to each other all hours of the day. I often see friends taking jabs at each other online. The comments may not be as harsh as to warrant being called bullying, but they can still sting.

The next time you tweet or update your status poking fun at someone, even if it is just in light-hearted jest, stop and think for a moment. You might want to hit the delete key and stop being an ignorant human being.

Cole Mayer can be reached at [email protected].