You’ve got hate mail — now what?

You’ve just come home from a stressful day at school and need a way to relax and unwind. It is the perfect opportunity to sign on to the addictive MySpace and pore over the blogs and comments of fellow cyberspacers.

After you sign on to your account and begin to browse the blogs of familiar faces, you notice that someone has written hateful, derogatory remarks about you. You feel embarrassed and overwhelmed as several questions race through your mind: What should I do to remedy this? Why would someone write this about me? Will people believe what they read? Your body becomes numb, and your mind becomes a blur. You have fallen prey to a cyberbully.

Stephen Baccari, a senior at California’s Monte Vista High School, said he was stunned by the vicious comments a classmate wrote on the popular Internet blog site MySpace.

“I was completely shocked because I was not aware of what people were saying about me. It also hurt me a lot because I never could imagine it could happen to me.”

Baccari’s plight is not uncommon among teenagers these days. As America becomes more technologically advanced, online bullying is replacing old-fashioned schoolyard brawls. Vindictive individuals realize that they can easily spread gossip and rumors to a wider audience through vehicles such as MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger, and LiveJournal.

“Cyberbullies feel better about themselves by putting other people down. They feel powerful because it makes someone else feel worse than they do. They have low self-esteem themselves,” said Christa Hammond, a psychologist at Monte Vista High School in Danville, Calif.

But what exactly defines cyberbullying? Sure, we see the sentimental Lifetime movies and read the articles in Seventeen about teenagers who face online bullying by classmates, yet we easily dismiss these cases as “severe and unreal” and believe they will never happen to us.

But cyberbullying encompasses a wide range of negative activities and forms of communication. According to Bill Belsey of www.cyberbullying.ca, “Cyberbullying involves the use of information and communication technologies such as e-mail, cell phone and pager text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal Web sites and defamatory online personal polling Web sites, to support deliberate, repeated and hostile behavior by an individual or group that is intended to harm others.”

Unfortunately, most cyberbullies easily escape punishment and repercussions because adults do not realize what is happening to a victim. Lacking familiarity with popular teen Web sites like MySpace and LiveJournal, many adults are unable to monitor their children’s online activities and thus cannot intervene in cyberbullying.

As live journals, My Space, and other forms of communication increase in popularity it is likely that cyberbullying will spread even further. Victims of cyberbullying are often perplexed as to an appropriate course of action to take to better the situation.

“I’m not too sure if cyberbully victims receive enough support, because I had no clue on what to do,” Baccari said.