Why Do Students Cyberbully Each Other?

Who knows why students do anything? When it comes to cyberbullying, they are often motivated by anger, revenge, or frustration. Sometimes they do it for entertainment or because they are bored and have too much time on their hands and too many tech toys available to them. Many do it for laughs or to get a reaction. They may do it because they think it’s fun.

A growing number do it to make a point to others, to improve their profile’s popularity or video’s page views, or to get attention for their “15 megabytes of fame.” And sometimes underlying issues of conflict, hate, revenge, bias, jealousy and contempt turn into cyberbullying.

Each of the four types of cyberbullies (and the one sub-type) does it for their own particular motive:

·         The Power-Hungry cyberbullies do it to torment others and to enhance their view of themselves as being in charge.

·         Revenge of the Nerd cyberbullies (a sub-type of Power-Hungry cyberbullies) may start out defending themselves from traditional bullying only to find that they enjoy being the tough guy or gal.

·         Mean Girl cyberbullies do it to help bolster or remind people of their own social standing.

·         Vengeful Angel cyberbullies think they are righting wrongs and standing up for others.

·         Inadvertent cyberbullies never meant to hurt anyone, but because they were careless hurt them by accident.

While the tactics may differ, most are motivated by anger, lack of impulse control, frustration, ego-boosting, revenge, jealousy, the need to teach someone a lesson, the desire to impress others, to make a point, to be funny or become more popular, to draw attention to their online posts and presence, by boredom, or by being careless, thoughtless, and typing without thinking.

Because their motives differ, the solutions and responses to each type of cyberbullying incident have to differ too. Unfortunately, there is no "one size fits all" when cyberbullying is concerned.