MANILA, 6 September 2019⁠—One in three young people in 30 countries said they have been a victim of online bullying, with one in five saying they skipped school due to cyberbullying and violence, according to a new poll released today by UNICEF, the United Nations organization working for children’s rights.

In the Philippines, latest national data show that cyberviolence affects almost half of children aged 13-17. The prevalence of cyberviolence for males (44 per cent) is almost the same for females (43 per cent).

One-third of cyberviolence experienced by Filipino children are in the form of verbal abuse over the internet or cellphone, while a fourth are through sexual messages. More females received messages of sexual nature or content than males. However, twice as many males than females reported having their nude body or sexual activities, whether real or falsified, shown on the internet or cellphone

Violence against children, in all forms including online bullying or cyberbullying, has devastating effects on the physical and emotional wellbeing of young people. This can create lasting emotional and psychological scars, even physical harm. It is particularly challenging to address since children are vulnerable and have easy access to the internet, making them easy targets of online violence.

In the UNICEF U-Report poll conducted in June 2019, almost three-quarters of young people from 30 countries said that social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are the most common platforms for online bullying. Being connected online means that school no longer ends once a student leaves class, and neither does bullying.

The U-Report further revealed that 32 per cent believe that the government is mainly responsible in addressing online bullying, 31 per cent said that young people are responsible, while 29 per cent said internet companies. These show that opinions are equally divided on who should be responsible for ending online bullying – highlighting the need to involve children and young people in the shared responsibility.

UNICEF is calling for urgent action to implement policies that will protect children and young people from bullying – both online and offline. Addressing the problem requires action from all of us.

Establishing and equipping national helplines to support children and young people in reporting violence is a concrete step. Training teachers and parents to respond to and prevent bullying will ensure the safety of children and young people, particularly the most vulnerable ones.

Gathering better data about the online behavior of children and young people, and how criminals are using the internet, will guide policies and action plans.

UNICEF is also urging social media and social networking service companies to improve ethical standards and practices in collecting and managing information of children.

Cyberbullying is hard to identify because the conversation usually doesn’t take place in a public space. So teachers or others can’t become aware and intervene, meaning it’s up to the individual to do something about it most of the time.

The issue is, there’s a big stigma around the problem of cyberbullying. Whenever someone tries to bring it up (especially adults) people tend to lash back. Things like “get off the internet then” or “just don’t read it” are common. However, that ignores the problem and won’t alleviate its symptoms.

So is there a solution?

Simply put, no – there isn’t one fix-all solution. It will take a conscientious effort from people to fight cyberbullying and shut offending behavior down.

According to CMO of NordVPN.solutions, Donnie A. Mitchell, for parents, it starts with educating their children on both the reasons why cyberbullying is bad as well as what to do if they’re targeted. This includes making sure they understand how cyberbullying affects others.

As a further precaution, parents can limit the number of websites or social media platforms their children have access to. There are various ways to do this, but the easiest way is to set up parental controls.

There are apps like Google Family Link or Qustodio. With these apps, parents can monitor their children’s mobile activity, limit usage, and block specific apps or websites.

Preventing cyberbullying as an adult is much harder, however. Because there’s really no controlling what other people do. But it’s still essential to address any bad behavior. It’s also important to have systems in place that keep the cyberbullies in check. However, these systems do need to actually work.

Sexual. Messages in this category contain explicit sexually offensive words that are intended to harass, intimidate, or make the recipient uncomfortable. There are both confessions, which convey the sender’s feeling towards the recipient and personal questions that are intended to make the recipient uncomfortable.

Hate. Messages in this category are intended to convey hatred and emotionally unsettle the recipient. Messages that convey hatred, death threats, and emotional/physical abuse belong in this bullying category.

Inappropriate flirting. The messages in this category are intended to convey a romantic interest toward the recipient. While this may not be considered bullying under normal circumstances, since the sender is anonymous, this can potentially cause significant distress to the recipient. We see messages that imply stalking, divulging/asking for personal secrets, and usage of words implying romantic interests, which especially under circumstances when the sender is anonymous can unsettle the recipient. This makes it an important bullying category to study.

Cyberbullying is an intentional action of harassment along the complex domain of social media utilizing information technology online. This research experimented unsupervised associative approach on text mining technique to automatically find cyberbullying words, patterns and extract association rules from a collection of tweets based on the domain / frequent words. Furthermore, this research identifies the relationship between cyberbullying keywords with other cyberbullying words, thus generating knowledge discovery of different cyberbullying word patterns from unstructured tweets. The study revealed that the type of dominant frequent cyberbullying words are intelligence, personality, and insulting words that describe the behavior, appearance of the female victims and sex related words that humiliate female victims. The results of the study suggest that we can utilize unsupervised associative approached in text mining to extract important information from unstructured text. Further, applying association rules can be helpful in recognizing the relationship and meaning between keywords with other words, therefore generating knowledge discovery of different datasets from unstructured text (Patacsil, 2019).