Are You Watching the Bullies Who Are Making Your Children’s Lives Miserable?

Internet is not a safe place. Let’s get that out of the way first. Yes, it is a huge convenience, but you can’t blind yourself to its serious cons. Connectivity is as good as it is bad. While it lets you connect with your loved ones, it lets strangers to tap into your life without your authorization and knowledge. Things are much worst for teenagers and preteens on the internet than they are for adults. It is not to say that adults are safe, but they are not as much in danger as teenagers and young boys and girls.

Cyber Bullying – A Silent and Irrevocably Devastating Threat

The one thing you cannot afford to say today is that you and your family are safe. The “it is not happening until it happens to us” philosophy can destroy nations, let alone families. Cyber bullying is a real threat, perhaps an elephant in the room that you can choose to ignore, but not for too long. One of the leading causes of cyber bullying and online blackmailing is breaches into private data. You can’t think you are safe when even the most high-tech companies are not.

Just in 2018, a little less than 450 million records of unsuspecting people were exposed to the cyber criminals. Yes, you are looking at the statistics from the last year. Your idea of “the tech is getting better” might shatter into pieces after reading this. The most important thing is that a lot of the cyber bullying arises from human interactions i.e. there is no rocket science involved in the hacking of information.

Now, you have to realize as a parent that bullying is real. From real life to the digital world, bullying is happening more than you might realize. For example, some recent reports found nearly 23% of the students admitting that they have done some of bullying to another person. While girls are the victims of bullying more than boys, they happen to be bullies more than boys too.

Let’s get specifically to cyber bullying now. If your son or daughter belongs to the LGBTQ group, he/she is among the group whose nearly 50% of the population faces bullying. Studies have shown that young individuals who experience online bullying have more tendency of committing a suicide or self-infliction than any other group does.

This is where things get scary. Studies and surveys have shown that if 10 young boys or girls experience bullying on the internet, only one of them will tell about the events to their parents. What makes matters worse is that when it comes to young boys and girls, 60% of them have seen bullying on the internet in some form but did nothing about it.

Revenge Porn – Dirty Games With Horrific Endings

Things get dirty when your friends turn into your foes. Ex-girlfriends and boyfriends have proven to be each other’s worst nightmares. They like to have a go at each other by sharing their intimate moments to embarrass the other person. What makes matters worse is that more than 30% of the young individuals have shared information on the internet which they classify as explicit – it includes naked or semi-naked pictures as well.

When it comes specifically to revenge porn, which is another name for sharing of explicit content without the person’s permission, America has 10 million victims of it. (Source)

The age group at the highest risk of falling prey to revenge porn is 15 to 29 years. More than 60% of the respondents in a survey admitted that they felt their partner or friend was pushing them sexting. At the same time, 33% of the boys and girls between the ages of 18 and 24 agree that they have sent a naked or objectionable picture of themselves to their friend/partner/significant other.

Closing Your Eyes Will Not Solve the Problem

These statistics are a clear proof that cyber bullying exists, and revenge porn is one of the ugliest forms of this type of harassment. More importantly, neither girls nor boys are spared from this issue. If you are a parent, you have to realize the sensitivity of the situation and take a step as soon as possible. If you have read the statistics carefully, you would know that the chance of your child hiding the truth from you is tremendously higher than the chance of him/her sharing the incidents of cyber bullying with you.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make here is thinking that your kid too responsible to fall into any of this. Anyone who is connected to the internet is vulnerable to hacks. More importantly, stealing information from smartphones is easier than you might realize. A friend could steal your child’s pictures from his/her phone in less than a minute. They just need an excuse to hold the phone of your child in their hands for a minute to do that. In many cases, your child has sent the pictures to someone after trusting them. Later on, that person turns hostile and damages your child’s reputation, career, physical, and mental health by sharing explicit photos online.

A Perfect Solution to the Problem – Cyberbully.watch

Cyberbully.watch has emerged as the best solution to this problem. If you are a parent, you are going to love this tool that addresses the issue by taking an action rather than talking about it. The tool lets educators and parents upload a picture of their child within the software. After the upload, Cyberbully.watch searches deep into the web i.e. blogs, private forums, adult websites, dark web, dating websites, etc. to find a match for the picture you have uploaded. If any matches are found, the tool opens a case automatically.

Only an authorized user of the software e.g. a lawyer or an official from a law enforcement department, can open the case to view the matches and additional information. The parents and educators only have to take a screen shot of the “basic” report they get on their screens to the lawyer or the police. Cyberbully.watches the most robust form of AI technology to match the pictures and it will only improve as more information is gathered with the passage of time. See this review to learn more.

Takeaway

As a parent, it is your responsibility to keep an eye on your child, not only because someone can bully him/her but also because they might be bullying someone on the internet. a leaked or hacked photo of your child can force him/her to suicidal behavior or cause extreme depression. With tools like Cyberbully.watch, some proactive attitude, and promptness, you can turn cyber bullies into epic failures.