CyberBullying and its relation to Suicide Ideation

Cyberbullying can be defined as a form of bullying in which the predator uses technological devices to target and harm the victims and disturb the victim psychologically, emotionally and behaviorally. There are multiple ways a predator tries to disturb the victim or try to harm the victim, these include insults, online threats, offensive text messages, voice calls, spreading false rumours about the victim or his/her close ones, spread of private content related to the victim on the internet.

According to a survey done by Microsoft, it was found out that India is in the 3rd rank for cyberbullying, and nearly 53% of the youth have experienced cyberbullying in one form or the other. The main advantage for the predator in cyberbullying is that he/she can do potential harm to the victim without letting others know their true identity and can do their work anonymously. In cyberbullying, there is an advantage for the predator as there is no need for the predator to have any kind of face-to-face contact with the victim.

There are various effects of cyberbullying, like a lowering of the self-esteem of a person, building of low confidence, problems in being attentive and concentrated on work, psychological distress, depression, helplessness, hopelessness, anger issues and even feelings of suicide. There are various platforms which can be used for cyberbullying, these include Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, messages, phone calls, video calls, online gaming and many more.

There are 3 characteristics of cyber bullying first is repetitive i.e; the bullying has passed off multiple times to the individual then only it’ll come beneath the criteria of cyberbullying, second is harmful i.e; the bullying is causing emotional, psychological and behavioural disruption in the victim and third is imbalance of power i.e; the predator has more power in comparison to the victim and can inflict the victim.

According to a survey, it was reported that nearly 60% of the adolescents reported that they were being affected by cyberbullying at school. Then the university students in Myanmar had more difficulty concentrating on their studies because of cyberbullying.

A study concluded that females were found to be more victims of cyberbullying than males. Out of the total participants for females it was 9.4% who were bullied once, whereas it was 8.3% of males were bullied in the same way. It was 13.3% for females who were cyberbullied more than once, whereas it was 7.8% in the case of males. Similarly, one more study, which was being conducted on female students in college, concluded that females who were being cyberbullied were likely to meet the symptoms of depression, and many of them were also suffering from a drinking problem.

A study was conducted on cyberbullying, whose main objective was to examine the relationship between cyberbullying and the feeling of suicide. Second, to see the gender difference between males and females for suicide ideation. 

For the study young adults between the age of 18 to 30 years were being taken to be the part of the study. Data was being collected using online surveys and also through the distribution of printed surveys in physical form. And the data was measured in the timespan of 30 days. A total of 212 participants were taken for the study, out of which 116 were females and 96 were males. IBM SPSS Statistics Subscription, version 28.0.1.0, was being used for statistical analysis. And the data was analysed using Pearson’s Bivariate Correlation.

The results of the study showed that out of 212 participants, 160 claimed that they were cyberbullied in some way or another other whereas 124 participants showed signs of suicide ideation. 24.5% of the participants claimed that they were never cyberbullied, whereas 75.5% participants claimed that they were cyberbullied, and 24% participants claimed that they had experienced severe cyberbullying, whereas 51.5% had a minor experience of cyberbullying.

Out of 124 participants who showed signs of suicide ideation, 17.6% of participants were reflecting extreme signs of suicide ideation, whereas the rest were showing some signs of suicide ideation. After the data was being analysed, it showed that there was a slight positive correlation, i.e, 0.549, between cyberbullying and suicide ideation. And also, there was a slight gender difference being found between males and females in terms of suicide ideation, which was 2.5% more in females.

However, the study suffered from certain limitations. The first one was that the study was limited to only university students and young adults. Second, no true cause and effect was found between cyberbullying and suicide ideation, even though was slight correlation was found between the two. Third, the sample for the survey consisted mostly of Hindus. And fourth, there was a chance of social desirability bias in the data that was being collected.