how vulnerable our students are to the crime against cyberbullying

how vulnerable our students are to the crime against cyberbullying

Violence is not a new act in our society. It is known by everyone but the rate at which it is escalating is related to the constant rise in the technological advancement and use by the youths. There is a lot of freedom to access of social media by everyone including the youths and adolescent high school students and even the young. Even though social media has its advantages such as making a new society, entertainment and learning, it has major setbacks especially to the norms and behaviors of different societies. Each society has its set of rules and norms that govern how each member should behave.

The use of facebook, twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp have brought about a high rate of violence among the youths and secondary school students. There are a lot of information on social media which are accessible to the society. These information influence thinking and eradicating the norms of the society resulting in deviant behaviors such as increased acts of violence. Cyberbullying is one such acts of violence influenced by social media. Cyberbullying is intimidation, threats or an attack either through a phone call, text or on social media by a minor to a minor which causes anxiety, panic, and fear and even psychological disturbances. According to the research done by Justin W. Patchin and Sameer, between 2007 – 2016, in one of the cyberbullying centers, it showed that an average of twenty-eight percent of the students is victims of the cyberbullying and average of sixteen percent of the students admitted that they have cyberbullied others. This shows how vulnerable our students are to the crime against cyberbullying which is the criminal offense. Even though this research showed the act of cyberbullying, it captured only high school students leaving the minors and preteens.

Increased cases of terrorism have also been linked to the influence of the social media. A lot of information is contained in the social media. In the study done, it showed that nearly ninety percent of all internet crimes are organized through social media because this the cheapest and fastest platform to spread their information. With a lot of enthusiasm, the youths tend to explore more especially on terrorism where some join the terrorist groups and others learn terrorism.

According to Hayward’s research, the traditional perception of the image was conceptualized and accepted as the best way and form of information. Advertisers used this acceptance and conceptualization as an advantage to market their terror images. This keen sense of society’s visual demands was mutilated and transformed by the advertisers to infiltrate the images of crimes and terror to the society. The images were being sent from the terror advertisers to the social media platforms, downloaded and transferred to various users.

Keith Hayward in his research found out that traditional perception on the image was conceptualized and accepted as a way of spreading information, other literature findings such as Pelivan and other literature of image and terrorism, an image is viewed as the source of bad memories and their use are discouraged.

Sexual risks in adolescent and its possible consequences remain a global health concern. Unethical sexual behaviors may result in sexually transmitted diseases, untimely pregnancy, and psychological trauma. The highest percentages of people using social media are teenagers between the age of 13-24 years. at this age, these teenagers are on adolescent stage and their sexual desire and needs tend to rise. Since they are able to access and use social media platforms, they are able to interact, get intimacy with the people they know or unknown people of opposite sex or same sex through short message services, sharing images or even talking over the phone. These may result in them linking up and meeting.

The sexual content in the media is universally available at all time without the positive discussion on the discouragement of unethical sexual acts. Teenagers can access these content all the time at any point making them assume that these unethical sexual acts are normal and are at disposal. These teenagers lack parental guidance on matters of the sexual content of the media. The survey shows that adolescents’ use of social media as a source of information is vital and the information they get from these sites are raw and untamed. Without parental guidance and control, they believe that all these information are true.

Through sexual socialization, the teenagers acquire sexual value and knowledge. Even though the parent may act as a source of information about sexual information, most teenagers prefer social media as the major of information to their parents. Teenagers of age between 10-18 use social media for six hours per day on average.

These literature have contributed a lot in creating awareness on the issue of teenage and social media. They have tried to spell clearly the advantages and disadvantages of the uncontrolled use of social media especially to the youth by pointing out the limits of using social media. These literature works have created awareness and drum support to the rescue of teenagers from the dangers of misusing the social media.

The overall strength of these pieces of work is that they are all condemning the use misuse of social media by the teenagers unanimously. They act as one united for to push and save teenagers from the dangers of the unethical use of social media. Parental guidance is also a common call from all these pieces of literature work. They tried to clearly spell out the role of the parents in regulating the unethical use of social media among their children.

The overall weakness of these pieces of literary work is that they all dented towards teenagers and social media without strongly taking it up with the regulatory bodies like software builders to put control through developing software and their accessibility according to age. They have not exhaustively bridged the gaps between the unethical use of social media, teenagers, and the old. They should critically address the role of the mature group of a society in promoting unethical social media behaviors among the teenagers.

The next step of research should be the role of government in regulating social media. The research on the role of social media on unethical or deviant behaviors on teenagers is done and the findings are, according to this literature is that there Is uncontrolled use of media by the teenagers. So should there be the control on the use of social media which can only be done by the authority, then this problem of deviant behavior will get a solution. Social media has decreases deviant behaviors among the teenagers by providing information about the dangers of unethical sexual behaviors such as contracting sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and AIDS.