Often, people comment or spread explicit images and videos of others not caring about the long-term effects on the victims. They take advantage of the virtual space and platform provided on the internet to bully and hurt other peoples’ feelings. In most cases, the cyberbullies are not always sincere with their hurting comments. They comment just for fun and try to outshine others. The more likes and attention one gets determines how tough he/she is in insulting. For instance on Facebook, people forget the platform is a virtual world but the account owners are real people with real feelings. This paper shall focus on Amanda Todd’s case as it is featured in Pendergrass (2014).
As is evident, none of the girls featured by Pendergrass deserved to die. For instance, Amanda, a 15-year-old girl was still so young and full of life before a man lured her to share a photo of her breasts after pampering her with all sorts of compliments on her beauty. She seems to have been so naive and unfortunately shared the photo. It is utterly incorrect to think Amanda must have been so immoral to do that. On the contrary, she fell for the wrong man. A manipulative man with no ethics and no shreds of integrity.
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From the onset, it is evident from the reading that this man wanted to use the breast photo as a bait to have sex with Amanda Todd. After Amanda stood on her ground and refused to put up a show for this man, he shamelessly shared the photo with Amanda’s classmates as he had threatened earlier and went ahead and created a Facebook account using her breasts photo as the profile photo. This could be the most depressing ordeal any internet user could go through. She became depressed just as the evil man wanted and became alcohol and drug abuser to try and cope with the torments not knowing this could only make her even more miserable. She eventually became a victim of irresponsible sex and later a victim of physical bullying.
The perpetrator lacked ethics and was morally corrupt. On the other hand, Amanda’s classmates were so cruel to her. They were so inconsiderate. Even after learning that she had tried to commit suicide, they continued to insult her on how they hoped she was dead and flooded her Facebook account with depressing comments. She eventually gave in and hanged herself. Despite all this pain, there seems to be no legal action taken against the man who started it all.
In my view, the man who spread Amanda’s nudes should be held accountable for her suicide. He has a case to answer and that kind of a person should be put behind the bars to serve as a reference to others who may think of punishing others in that manner. Actually, such people should be put to a fair trial and if found guilty, they should be jailed for a period of time. In my view, cyberbullying is worse than other forms of bullying because the audience of the internet is so huge and worse still, the internet never forgets. Amanda’s death was wrongful because she just fell in the hands of a morally corrupt man. She was just a minor.
Fortunately, I have never been a victim of cyberbullying and neither of the people I know has. I’m always so considerate when commenting on issues in online platforms. I would never wish to hurt anyone online.
According to Chernenko et al. (2018), cyberspace is currently poorly managed and there is no serious mechanism to combat online abusers. This gives room for those with malicious intention to thrive on inflicting pain to the target victims without any defined repercussions. This trickles down to the schools and mostly it becomes detrimental to the victims resulting in many suicide cases across the world. This calls for schools to develop measures to suppress cyberbullying.
In my own view, I’d propose that an application be developed where students can report any suspected abuse apart from the reporting platforms provided by social media. This application should be able to send a link of the abuse to a government investigating body for proper investigation to start and also to the school management for proper investigation. Upon fair investigation, the school should hand over the perpetrators to the relevant authority for fair conviction. Additionally, schools should adopt a culture of sensitization against cyberbullying because it’s purely a moral issue.
References
Chernenko, E., Demidov, O., & Lukyanov, F. (2018). Increasing international cooperation in cybersecurity and adapting cyber norms. Council on Foreign Relations.
Pendergrass, W. S., & Wright, M. (2014). Cyberbullied to death: An analysis of victims taken from recent events. Issues in Information Systems (15)1, 132–140.
