What is Bullying?

Bullying is when someone intentionally does or says something to hurt another person. This behaviour is often repetitive and deliberate. Bullying can take many forms such as:

  • Physical Bullying – Hitting, slapping, shoving, tripping, spitting, throwing objects, blocking someone’s path; damaging, stealing or withholding someone’s property
  • Verbal Bullying – Insults, teasing, racism, threats, hurtful jokes
  • Social Bullying – Excluding someone from an activity or group, ignoring someone, talking about someone negatively behind their back, spreading rumours
  • Cyberbullying – Using technology such as cell phones and the internet to blackmail, threaten, intimidate, insult, spread rumours, post private/humiliating images or videos

Recognize the Signs

Warning signs that someone is being bullied can include:

  • Withdrawal from activities
  • Unexplained injuries
  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Signs of depression or anxiety
  • Skipping school
  • Using substances (alcohol and/or drugs)
  • Aggressive and/or violent behaviour
  • Eating disorder symptoms/development
  • Mentally – someone may be feeling upset, embarrassed, stupid, irritability, guilt, judged, lonely, untrusting overwhelmed, nervous, anxious, afraid, angry
  • Emotionally – feeling ashamed or losing interest in the things you love
  • Biological symptoms –pain, decreased appetite, difficulty sleeping, stomachache, headache
  • Negative thoughts & self talk
  • Always let your parents know where you are going and when you will be home.
  • Walk with a buddy or a group of friends.
  • Know your neighborhood and safe places to go if you need help.
  • Stay away from cars occupied by strangers. Do not approach a vehicle even if the occupant asks for help or directions.
  • Never flash money, bus passes, cell phones cameras or other possessions. Don’t tell people what you have in your locker.

How can i support a friend who is being bullied?

  • Remind them that you’re there for them and you want to help.
  • Be kind.
  • Help them think through what they might say and to whom.
  • Offer to go with them if they decide to report.

If your friend still does not want to report the incident, then support them in finding a trusted adult who can help them deal with the situation. Remember that in certain situations the consequences of cyberbullying can be life threatening.

Cyber/Online Bullying

Cyberbullying can take place on social media, messaging platforms, gaming platforms, SMS, Text, forums, and on digital devices like mobile phones, computers and tablets. Cyberbullying includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else. It can include sharing personal or private information about someone else causing embarrassment or humiliation. Cyberbullying opens the door to 24-hour harassment and can be very damaging.

This includes:

  • spreading lies about or posting embarrassing photos or videos of someone on social media
  • sending hurtful, abusive or threatening messages, images or videos via messaging platforms
  • impersonating someone and sending mean messages to others on their behalf or through fake accounts.

The most common places where cyberbullying occurs are:

  • Social Media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok
  • Text messaging and messaging apps on mobile or tablet devices
  • Instant messaging, direct messaging, and online chatting over the internet
  • Online forums, chat rooms, and message boards, such as Reddit
  • Email
  • Online gaming communities

Face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying can often happen alongside each other. But cyberbullying leaves a digital footprint – a record that can prove useful and provide evidence to help stop the abuse. This public record can be thought of as an online reputation, which may be accessible to schools, employers, colleges, clubs, and others who may be researching an individual now or in the future. Cyberbullying can harm the online reputations of everyone involved – not just the person being bullied, but those doing the bullying or participating in it.

Cyberbullying is unique in that in can be:

  • Persistent – Digital devices offer an ability to immediately and continuously communicate 24 hours a day, so it can be difficult for children experiencing cyberbullying to find relief.
  • Permanent – Most information communicated electronically is permanent and public, if not reported and removed. A negative online reputation, including for those who bully, can impact college admissions, employment, and other areas of life.
  • Hard to Notice – Because teachers and parents may not overhear or see cyberbullying taking place, it is harder to recognize.

How can i prevent my personal information from being used against me on social media?

  • Think twice before posting or sharing anything on digital platforms – it may be online forever and could be used to harm you later.
  • Don’t give out personal details such as your address, telephone number or the name of your school.

Learn about the privacy settings of your favourite social media apps

  • You can decide who can see your profile, send you direct messages or comment on your posts by adjusting your account privacy settings.
  • You can report hurtful comments, messages, photos and videos and request they be removed.
  • Besides ‘unfriending’, you can completely block people to stop them from seeing your profile or contacting you.
  • You can also choose to have comments by certain people to appear only to them without completely blocking them.
  • You can delete posts on your profile or hide them from specific people.

Sextortion

Sextortion is blackmail – someone online threatens to send a sexual image or video of you to other people if you refuse to pay them or provide more sexual content.

How does this occur?

  • Youth (young men in particular) are often tricked into believing they are talking to a young girl.
  • Sextorters convince their victims to exchange sexual content and often start the trade by sharing a sexual photo first. The targeted youth then sends a sexual photo or video, or are tricked into exposing themselves or engaging in a sexual act over a livestream and being unknowingly recorded.
  • Immediately after receiving the sexual content, the sextorter makes their demands. If a young girl is victimized, the sextorter typically demands additional sexual photos and videos. If the sextorter targets a boy, they almost always demand money instead. – The sextorter will try to intimidate their victim by threatening to leak the content online or share it directly with the youth’s friends/family if they don’t comply. It‘s common for the offender to share screenshots of the youth’s contacts or other identifying information (school, home address) to terrify the youth into sending sexual photos or money.
  • If the youth gives in, the sextorter will demand more sexual photos or money. Sextorters will sometimes barter and accept a lower amount if the youth says they cannot pay.
  • If the sextorter demands money, payment forms vary from online payment providers like PayPal, Western Union, MoneyGram, etc.; through online gift cards for Amazon, Google Play, Steam, VISA, etc.; or through e-transfer direct from bank accounts.

Other tactics used:

  • Offering a gift or money in exchange for a youth sending sexual content.
  • Targeting multiple siblings or friends connected to the original victim (ex: threatening to ruin victim’s life or hurt family or animals if thy don’t comply quickly).
  • Creating multiple accounts to make is seem as though youth is being targeted by several individuals.
  • Demanding youth to make other social media accounts for sextorter to use in victimizing other youth.
  • Threatening to share the sexual image/video with a school or many schools.
  • Threatening to share the sexual image/video with newspapers, news outlets and TV stations.

What should youth do if being sextorted?

If someone is threatening to share your nude image or video, there is help:

  • Immediately stop talking to them. Screenshot all of the messages you have with the sextorter. Depending on the situation, you may want or need to share them with a safe adult or police.
  • Never pay money and never send additional nudes.
  • Do NOT give in to threats.
  • Responding often makes the harassment worse.
  • Delete and block the sextorter.
  • Reach out for help and report. Speak to a safe adult for support.

You don’t have to deal with sextortion on your own – it’s a lot to manage, but there are supports available to help you.

For help:

  • Go to NeedHelpNow.ca for support and help on what to do next.
  • Report to Cybertip.ca. All concerns about sextortion are also forwarded to police.
  • In many cases, Cubertip.ca will reach out to services like Instagram and Snapchat to intervene in the moment to help get the sextorters’ accounts disabled.
  • NeedHelpNow.ca offers teems important information and guidance on how to stop the spread of intimate images or videos, and provide support.

Online Lurking

Online lurking is when a person (typically an adult but not always) communicates with youth through technology, like texting, direct messaging, or chatting in an app/game/website, to make it easier to commit a specific sexual offence against them.

Adults looking to exploit youth use a number of tactics to groom teens online, such as sending sexually explicit material, misrepresenting who they are (e.g., saying they’re also a teen), or attempting to establish a romantic relationship. This coercion is used in hopes the youth will either meet the offender in person or send sexually explicit material, which may be used to blackmail or extort the teen.