Yan from China On the Internet you might meet some mean guys who call you names, send virus emails to your mailbox, or bother you by by sending you annoying text messages. If a stranger does this to you, it's OK, not a big problem. You can just block them your email contact list and MSN messenger. If you receive annoying text messages on your cell phone, you can use that phone and call 911. However, if someone who knows you, your friends, and your family does that to you, it is not the same because the bully can send those terrible messages to everyone you know. In one case, someone put a very common and normal picture of a young student in China on the Internet. Nobody could have known that many hackers would take his picture and alter the picture in many different ways for fun. Those pictures they made were funny, and everybody liked the boy. We called him "Little Fat Boy." I swear we were NOT calling him names or trying to hurt him. It is just like a nickname that means we like the young boy. The hackers were not doing it to bully, only for fun, and the young boy is very cool in those pictures. However, now I realize that online bullying hurts. If everybody around me took those kind of pictures of me and said "Little Fat boy" to me, I would feel terrible. I think online bullying hurts as much as physical or verbal bullying. You can block it online so you can't see it on your computer, but you cannot get it out of your life completely because others can still see it on their computers. We need to stop online bullying. Return to: School Bullying | Issue 25 | Home Page TOPICS Online Magazine ©1997-2009 - Sandy and Thomas Peters - topics.mag@gmail.com |
