Understanding the psyche of cyberbullies and the distress of the victims

On July 2022, an 11-year-old boy in Tasikmalaya, West Java, suffered from severe depression, which led him to commit suicide after falling victim to bullying by his classmates. The boy was coerced into engaging in a sexual act with a cat and was filmed by his classmates – who then posted the video on social media. The boy, who could not take anything to eat or drink days after the incident, passed away on July 18, 2022.

Am I not a human like you?

The sight of the article’s header triggered my gag reflex. Memories of being bullied in my childhood came overflowing and I found my hand trembling for the next few minutes. I remembered burying my head under my neighbor’s sofa, crying, while their son threw anything he could get his hands on at my lower half, extending outside from under the couch. “Monkey!” he cackled.

In my primary school days in South Tangerang, Banten, one of my classmates pushed me headfirst into the gutter as we lined up for our morning ceremony. Again, the person on the giving end seemingly took joy in the incident as he guffawed heartily. Emerging from the gutter with blood trickling from my head, I was rushed to the nearest clinic on a motorcycle. The doctor there gave me six stitches afterward. It was 1996.

The advent of the internet gave rise to more complex issues related to bullying, and the behavior can be dichotomized mainly into two, traditional and cyber. The latter is not a new thing, mind you. Internet trolls have been around ever since the medium was invented.

Textbook internet trolls would hide behind a combination of enabling factors, mainly anonymity, which “allows people to separate from in-person identity and moral agency, thereby freeing them to express hostility and criticism without any effect to the psyche,” according to Christopher Terry et al.’s 2016 article, “The Emerging Issue of Digital Empathy”.

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