Mobile harassment

Mobile harassment refers to the sending of any type of text message, sext, photo message, video message, or voicemail from a mobile phone that causes the receiver to feel harassed, threatened, tormented, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise victimized. It is recognized as a form of cyber bullying.

Prevalence

Due to the prevalence of mobile devices today, mobile harassment has emerged as worldwide trend. Based on recent studies, harassment involving mobile devices are particularly prevalent in the United Kingdom and Australia while in the United States, the Internet is the favoured method.[1] In 2009, a survey in the United Kingdom showed that approximately 14 percent of the young participants reported that they had been victims of mobile harassment, ranging from name calling to sending threatening text messages, or sending photos or videos intended to frighten or intimidate.[2] Another study out of Queensland, Australia suggests that number of victims could be even higher, finding that 93.7 percent of teenagers experienced mobile harassment of some kind. This study concluded that while boys tend to experience more mobile bullying than girls, girls are more likely to be upset about the harassment.[3] Researchers also revealed that about a third of adolescents have been harassed or cyberbullied.[4] This number could still expand considering the fact that there are victims who do not recognize this kind of harassment or those who do not want to acknowledge it because it is humiliating in itself.[5]

Cases of mobile harassment often transpire outside of school but, since the perpetrators and victims are often classmates, the harassment can spill over to the school environment.[4]

Solutions

Since mobile harassment is a relatively new phenomenon, there is a current lack of measures that specifically address the problem aside from generic legislation.[6] However, schools often adopt policies and regulations that could help deter its incidence. For instance, administrators prohibit students from taking pictures and sharing visual materials within the school premises.[6] There are also proposals that sought to completely ban the use of mobile devices in school.[7] Private organizations are also increasingly adopting their respective regulatory policies to contribute to tackling the issue. This is evident in a recent decision on the part of Facebook to adopt its own internal harassment and bullying policies.[8] The social media company, which is cited as one of the commonly used network to harass people,[9] also adopted measures that enable them to "remove content that appears to purposefully target private individuals with the intention of degrading or shaming them.”[10]

Awareness

In November 2009, LG Mobile Phones released an advertising campaign in the United States, that used humor to encourage teens to think before they text. The adverts featured James Lipton. LG released a series of videos on YouTube with the tag line “Before you text, give it a ponder.”

The television show Gossip Girl contains many episodes with storylines that revolve around gossipy, misinterpreted or questionable text messages.

gollark: You mean it's manual?
gollark: Secure (running over HTTPSy stuff), easier (no need to write all your code in horrors like Lua), and buzzwordier.
gollark: Actually, I'd use websockets.
gollark: Er, no. Sound is probably annoying to set up.
gollark: Alert me via my websocket terminal thing.

References
  1. Morgan, Konrad; Brebbia, C.A.; Spector, Michael (2016). The Internet Society II: Advances in Education, Commerce & Governance. Boston: WIT Press. p. 155. ISBN 1845641701.
  2. Conwell, Chris (2009). Cyber Bullying. UK.
  3. Drennan, Judy, Mark Brown, and Gillian Sullivan Mort. 2007. The Impact of M-Bullying on Self-Esteem and Subjective Well Being Archived 2014-03-22 at the Wayback Machine Social Entrepreneurship, Social Change and Sustainability: Proceedings of the 2007 International nonprofit and Social Marketing Conference, Brisbane, Australia
  4. Zheng, Yan (2015). Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. p. 533. ISBN 9781466682399.
  5. Katz, Adrienne (2012). Cyberbullying and E-safety: What Educators and Other Professionals Need to Know. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. pp. 25. ISBN 9781849052764.
  6. Greener, Sue; Rospigliosi, Asher (2012). Electronic Journal of E-Learning: EJEL. Academic Conferences Limited. p. 332.
  7. Baker, Jordan (2018-06-21). "'Massively overdue' smartphone review to tackle predators, cyberbullies". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2018-07-12.
  8. "Responding to Workplace Complaints | FB People Practices". Retrieved 2018-07-12.
  9. Thompson, Rachel. "Facebook is no longer the worst social network for online bullying". Mashable. Retrieved 2018-07-12.
  10. "Tech giants are failing to address cyber-bullying, pushing children to brink: Inquiry". NewsComAu. Retrieved 2018-07-12.
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