How to protect from CyberBullying - Cyber Safety Measures for Teenagers

Cyber bullying is not only common rather increasing day by day among teenagers, school going students.  Cyber-bullying requires high level of attention because not only children are stressed at psychological level but often they go into depression or committed suicide or sometimes behave very aggressively or rudely after having been muddled in  cyber-bullying incidents.

Intentionally or unintentionally when a child, or school going student is harassed, humiliated,  by another child using mobile phones or any electronic media or Internet is called as Cyber-bullying. 

Cyber bullying incidents normally take place on social networking websites such as Facebook,  and Twitter etc. Mcafee 2014 study reveals that 87% of youth have witnessed cyber bullying.

Safety Measures Parents and Teachers can opt to save their child or student from being a victim of cyber bullying incident-

1. To ensure safety and security parents and teachers must spend time with children and discuss their online activities. Know what exactly they do browse or post. It has been seen that girls prefer social media chat programs like Instagram while boys prefer to interact over gaming console. 
2. Ask your child to enable privacy settings on Facebook, Twitter etc.
3. Get access of your children’s social media accounts and passwords of children’s devices, in case of any emergency you can help them or know their whereabouts.
4. Educate children to keep their passwords safe and tell them not share their passwords with their friends. 
5. Schools must educate the students about cyberbullying, cyber ethics and cyber law as well. 
6. Never allow them to share their personal information openly like email ids, mobile number or address etc.
7. Tell them not to open emails or Facebook messages from unknown persons or from known cyber bullies. Ask them to delete such messages without reading. 
8. Take Screen shots of cyber  bullying incidents and report the incident to the police.
9. Report cyber bullying incident to the relevant website by clicking on the “Report Abuse” button.
10. Educate children that social media friends may not be your real friends.