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
  • Negative thoughts and self talk
  • Mental – someone may be feeling upset, embarrassed, stupid, irritable, guilty, judged, lonely, untrusting, overwhelmed, nervous, anxious, afraid, or angry
  • Emotional – feeling ashamed or losing interest in the things you love
  • Physical – pain, decreased appetite, difficulty sleeping, stomach ache, headache
  • 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 neighbourhood 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, 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 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 or through fake accounts

The most common places where cyberbullying occurs are:

  • Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok
  • Text messaging and messaging apps on mobile or tablet devices
  • Instant messaging, direct messaging, and online chats
  • 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, clubs, and others who may search 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 “block” people to stop them from seeing your profile or contacting you
  • You can choose to have comments from certain people 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! It occurs when 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 an age-appropriate peer
  • 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 is tricked into exposing themselves or engaging in a sexual act over a livestream and is unknowingly recorded.
  • Immediately after receiving the sexual content, the sextorter makes their demand. 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 and 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 scare the youth into sending more sexual photos or money.
  • If the youth complies, 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 can vary from online payment providers like PayPal, Western Union, MoneyGram, etc. to online gift cards for Amazon, Google Play, Steam, VISA, etc. to e-transfers.

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 (e.g., threatening to ruin the victim’s life or hurt family or animals if they don’t comply quickly)
  • Creating multiple accounts to make it seem as though the youth is being targeted by several individuals
  • Demanding the youth make other social media accounts for the sextorter to use to victimize other youth
  • Threatening to share the sexual image/video with a school (or several schools)
  • Threatening to share the sexual image/video with newspapers, news outlets, and TV stations

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. Their intent is to convince the youth to meet the offender in person or send sexually explicit material, which may be used to blackmail or extort the teen.

What should youth do if being sextorted?

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

  • Immediately stop communicating with the sextorter. Screenshot all of the messages/exchanges 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 can feel overwhelming, but there are supports available to help.

For help:

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