Cyber Bullying: It needs to be addressed

Over the last year, one of the main concerns at the Youth Centre that I run has been with our Computer Access Program (CAP) Site. It seems as though the visitors to our site have been, among other things, practicing cyber bullying. As the youth centre is a big place and we do not have funding for a position to concentrate only on the CAP site, this often comes to our attention when it is almost too late to do anything.



With that being said, something that must be understood about the way of life here in the north is that “only the fittest will survive.” It has always been the way of life here to take care of your family first and then whatever you had left over was shared with other families… no need to look to the future when you had to worry about surviving in the present. Children have always been taught that they need to be strong in order to survive, however, over the years it seems as though these children have taken this idea and come to conclude that in order to show that they are strong, they have to hurt others in the process.



To my knowledge, cyber bullying has harshly affected one teen in our community to the point that the teen upped and moved to another community. This is something that I would like to prevent in the future, as well as to guard from other more horrible things that come from this type of bullying. As this is the case, I thought to my self; “What is one of the most effective ways to communicate to the children here that cyber bullying is not okay?”
One of the ideas that I came up with was using the internet to find a good tool to communicate with…and what better than an animated YouTube video. Here is one that I found was done very well and was very helpful.



I am hoping to contact the elementary and high school here in Cape Dorset and ask them if I can do up a presentation about cyber bullying to present to the kids in the New Year. To me this is an issue that needs to be addressed by all members of our community and dealt with on a serious note before it gets out of hand and we have suicides occurring in result to bring cyber-bullied. The sad reality is…only when something like that happens will the community begin to take cyber bullying seriously.