Cyberbullying - A Panel Discussion.

I am looking forward to Friday for this event! It would be my first collaborative event of the year! My life has been frozen for a couple of weeks due to some upskilling courses that I need to finish, venturing out to possibly an exciting opportunity (it requires a lot of mental energy for it), and I am thankful now that I have completed them all and finally can take a breather from it.

There is so much that I wanted to do, yet so little time.

Coming back to cyberbullying, in my honest opinion, it is an upgrade version of physical bullying, but the harm done is at least 10 times more hurtful (speaking from observation and experience). The intention to inflict harm to others by harassing, threatening as well as posting mean messages or images using the electronics powered by the internet is a good justification of what cyberbullying is about.

Recalling one of the discussion sessions I had with my homeroom students a couple of years back, my class concluded that cyberbullying is an avenue for people who lack self-respect as well as empathy to the others around them. I still remember one of my students telling the entire class that having a difficult conversation is hard but shouldn't be avoided if we are not happy with the situation that we are in at that moment.

It makes me think a lot that day.

The idea is cyberbullying is bad. The bullies are bad. The intentions are harmful.

But what if the act justified as cyberbullying is just an act of resignation from someone who has been nice to others but tolerated so much and finally boom - they just exploded because they simply could not handle being treated unfairly?

The execution to get the other party to understand the message via cyberbullying is wrong but how sure I am that I have equipped my students with the restorative mindset as well as constructive strategies to navigate the difficult conversations and stand up for their rights respectfully and with compassion to others?

And this leads me back to the same question I have since I was a kid:

Are all bad people bad?