Online Violence Effects On Teens

Depression is a serious thing for everyone, but especially in teens. This is why teens need to watch what they look up and say online. Once it’s online it never truly goes away. Teens even talk about Substance abuse, violence, and sex online. The number of teens posting about alcohol use is 37%, tobacco use is 13%, drug use is 10.2%, use of any substance is 41%, use of more than one substance is 15.6%, and use of all three substances is 3.6%. Violence is another thing that teens choose to talk about online. 14.4% of profiles had reference to violence. Along with drugs and violence teens also had sexual references. 24% of teen profiles had references to sex and 3.6% of profiles had self-disclosure of sexual activity. In fact, there were …show more content…
A Vermont 13-year-old, Ryan Halligan, silently endured cyberbullying for a month while taking everything that was thrown his way. Ryan began making suicidal comments, but no one ever noticed, the taunting and degrading just continued. One night Ryan posted, “Tonight’s the night.” In response, one of his classmates said, “It’s about time.” Ryan proved them right that night and hung himself (Haddock). In San Francisco, California’s Washington High School is still recovering from an incident in 2005. What happened was that a cyberbully hacked into the school’s website and posted obscene photos of a student along with his face photoshopped onto other bodies, and racial slurs with gang slogans. The school’s admin tried to take it down as quickly as possible, but it wasn’t an easy task to accomplish. This cyberbully was caught, but he wasn’t tried (Haddock). A 17-year-old boy from North Carolina was tried and charged with cyberbullying on February 28, 2014. This was after he posted a nude photo of a 15-year-old girl on Instagram. The boy was open and honest about what he had done and he was suspended from school after the charge (CNN Wire) These are examples of what can happen if someone is being bullied or if someone is the bully. Rebecca Kullback stated that “Kids have access to one another 24 hours a day. They can bully each other at midnight” (Simmons). There really is no escape from cyberbullying, no matter how hard one may try. With cyberbullying parents usually don’t know what’s going on unless they do phone or computer checks. Most parents don’t hesitate to take responsibility for what their child may do on the playground or at school so what happens online shouldn’t be any different