Challenges Facing Today’s Generation

Some of the challenges that occur in every generation are bullying and drug and alcohol abuse. People bully others because they feel bad and make others feel the same. Today a lot of people smoke and even more smoked in the 1900’s. There were even advertisements about cigarettes as well! One of the challenges unique to this generation is cyberbullying.

Everyday people are cyberbullied online. What's scary is that anyone can be a bully and anyone can be bullied. Cyberbullying isn’t about conflict, it’s about control. When it’s about conflict, children stop when they realize they are hurting someone. When children cyberbully, they realize they are hurting someone and are satisfied they have control. When cyberbullying happens, the victim isn’t evenly matched with the bully, the bully often has way more power. In 2018, the top 3 countries that were cyberbullied were India, Brazil, and the United States. What’s very helpful is that bystanders can be powerful allies. They also often have more power than the bully him/herself. 57% of bullying stops when one of the peers intervenes. Unfortunately, bystanders intervene less than 20% of the time. Bullying can be a serious threat to student health, their safety, and their wellbeing. The student would want to avoid school, increasing the rates of dropping out. It would affect their health by resulting in stomach aches or headaches. It would affect their wellbeing by causing depression, fear or anxiety. It would also affect their safety by increasing their aggression, causing harm to their self and others, and increasing their retaliation.

Ways we can combat this challenge is to report the cyberbully, this way the bully can’t get to you anymore. You can also not engage since the bully wants a reaction from you. You also can’t get turned around, people who are the victim of a bully fight back and end up a bully themself. Another way is to keep everything, because sometimes cyberbullying crosses the line between aggravation to harassment or threats.

This happened to Izzy Dix, who committed suicide. The police set up an investigation but found nothing. Her mother, Gabbi, has obtained a record with a pattern of cyberbullying. The thing responsible is the platform. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the three most popular social media platforms. However, these platforms protect free speech. So when people cyberbully, they hesitate to punish unless it’s severe. They also have a hard time managing billions of users because 2.77 billion people use social media. Users may also flag or report posts they don’t like, with this happening, these platforms have a hard time telling which is which. 

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