Preventing Bullying in College

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Eliminating Bullying in College

Bullying and cyberbullying are serious topics with a variety of short-term and long-term implications for all parties involved. Our guide will help stakeholders understand the elements of bullying in college, process how bullying affects others, respond appropriately to bullying, and readily access resources to help others. Invest time today to understand cyberbullying and bullying and what you need to do to protect yourself and your loved ones from online and offline aggression. The table of contents below gives an overview of what this guide will include.

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What is Bullying?

In its most basic form, bullying is the use of coercion, threats, and/or force to intimidate, influence, or abuse another person by an individual or group. Typical conflict bends into bullying when the real or perceived acceptable balance of physical, social, and/or emotional power becomes imbalanced in an often-repeated pattern.

Tools and behaviors that are leveraged to dominate another person include physical assaults, verbal threats, coercion, harassment, and intimidation based on social class, physical characteristics, personal associations, personality, gender association, lineage, abilities, and/or reputation.

What is Cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying is the intentional act of a person being cruel, mean, crude, or degrading propagated through digital means. In a college context, cyberbullying can be motivated by a student's perceived or actual sexual orientation, national origin, color, race, religion, ancestry, gender, mental, physical, emotional, gender expression, or other distinguishing personal characteristics. The intent of a cyberbully in college can be one or more of the following:

  • Create an intimidating or threatening learning environment
  • Damage property or physically harm another student
  • Disrupt the continuity of a school's normal operations
  • Interfere with and distract a student's educational opportunities

The most common types of cyberbullying can be disseminated through digital mediums such as email, cell phone calls, text messages, chat rooms, websites, and a variety of social medial platforms.

What is Cyber Hate?

Cyber Hate is related to but different from cyberbullying. Cyber Hate is the utilization of electronic communications to spread bigoted, racist, and/or bigoted information. Digital communications can include a variety of platforms and electronic mediums including user-generated content, social networks, dating sites, websites, email, cell phones, blogs, and text messages.

Preventing Bullying in College

Is There a Difference Between Teasing and Bullying?

According to Psychology Today, teasing is not just a slightly less evil cousin of bullying. In fact, there are good and bad forms of teasing. Good teasing is often known as pro-social teasing by researchers and is banter that is intended to be playful or humorous in an attempt to denote affiliation or express affection. On the other hand, bad teasing is known as anti-social teasing with the intent of harassing, intimidating, and/or hurting another person.