Raising legal, social awareness needed to tackle rise in cyberbullying: Psychology Professor

Raising legal, social awareness needed to tackle rise in cyberbullying: Psychology Professor

By Majd Othman

KUWAIT: There are many ways to bully and hurt someone online. While cyberbullying has many forms and types, it has the same destructive effect on the victim. Bullying varies between harassment, defamation, identity impersonation, cyberstalking, electronic ostracism, hacking, as well as electronic bullying through photography, spying, and deception.

To learn more about this topic, Kuwait Times spoke with Amthal Al-Huwailah, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Kuwait University and discussed with her various issues related to cyberbullying and its impact on the bullied victims. “Bullying is the umbrella term of violence that starts with the bully from a young age as we can see in schools on a daily basis,” Huwailah said. “Meanwhile, cyberbullying is one of the different forms of bullying which can be psychological or physical.”

She mentioned that there are many reasons behind bullying. “The bully takes that kind of attitude for several reasons,” she said. “The reasons include feeling strong and powerful when they verbally attack their victims, taking out their frustration and anger from their social environment, not investing their free time with useful things, feeling stressed, or due to low self-confidence.”

“Social media helps increase the bullying behavior because the identity of the