Bullies And Their Targets The Same In Surprising Number of Cases

It may have been inevitable that cyberbullying would twist inside out, knotting up some kids to the point that they role-play both sides of a conflict — the aggressor and the target — and post vile comments about themselves online. Think of it as the digital equivalent to cutting, a way for hurting kids to talk about the awful things going on inside their heads.

“Drink bleach.” “Kill ur self.” “Go die evry1 wuld be happy.”

Those were among the taunts that appeared on the social media pages of Hannah Smith, a Leicestershire, England, 14-year-old who hanged herself in 2013. At first, her death appeared to be another sad case of a teen choosing death to escape vicious online bullying. But as more information came out, a fresh horror emerged: Hannah had been trolling herself online.

Intrigued, Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin, the co-directors of the Cyberbullying Research Center, looked more closely at the phenomenon. Their research, published last fall in the Journal of Adolescent Health, yielded a surprising conclusion: Self-bullying isn’t a fluke but a chilling new trend called “digital self-harm.”

That kids sometimes bully themselves makes confronting cyberbullying, seen by many as a national epidemic of staggering proportions, all the more confounding for parents. It’s perplexing enough that kids are killing themselves to escape incessant online torment. But the findings of Hinduja and Patchin add a baffling new question: How can parents be sure menacing comments posted online about their kids didn’t come from their own children?

Patch is taking a closer look at these and other issues surrounding cyberbullying and traditional bullying in a months-long reporting project, “The Menace of Bullies: Can We Stop This?”

‘THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF KIDS’

The parents of Natalie Natividad, a 15-year-old from Hebbronville, Texas, who took a lethal dose of pills to end her life in 2016, thought the vicious comments calling their daughter “ugly” and telling her she “should kill herself” came from a nemesis at school.

The taunts were posted in a surprising place — the anonymous network After School, which promises kids a safe online place to talk about their struggles. Natalie’s suicide prompted the network to improve its settings to detect self-harm threats.

Natalie could have been any of one in 20 middle- and high school-aged students who admitted in the Cyberbully Research Center survey they had anonymously made baleful comments about themselves online.

The survey, sent to a statistically relevant group of 5,500 American middle- and high school students, ages 12 to 17, showed 7.1 percent of boys and 5.3 percent of girls had engaged in digital self harm — a number that surprised Hinduja.

“We were expecting numbers to be 1 to 2 percent, but at 6 percent with males and females together — that’s much higher than we thought,” Hinduja said. “It’s a non-trivial amount. That’s thousands and thousands of kids.”

Among these kids, those already targeted by a cyberbully were 12 times more likely than other kids to bully themselves online, and teens who identified as non-heterosexual were three times more likely to self-bully than teens who said they were heterosexuals.

Girls who self-bully were more likely than boys to say they were struggling with depression — an alarming finding given the rise in suicide among teenage girls. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last year that suicide rates among girls ages 15-19 doubled from 2007 to 2015, the highest point in the 40 years CDC has collected research on the topic.

Hinduja, a professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, and Patchin, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, said their findings only scratch the surface of the phenomenon of digital self-harm and more research is needed.

The study didn’t link digital self-harm and suicide, but other research shows correlations between traditional self-harm — behaviors like cutting, scratching, hitting and biting that between 13 percent and 18 percent of teens engage in — and suicidal thoughts, attempts and successes.

But, Hinduja said, the reasons kids gave “seem to be rooted in the same emotional struggles” cited by kids who engage in traditional self-harm.

Kids’ explanations varied. A common theme was self-hate. While girls’ self-bullying seemed to be rooted in emotional struggles, boys were more likely to laugh off their posts as jokes and “the games people play,” Hinduja said.

Another common response, “I already felt bad and just wanted to make myself feel worse,” mirrors some of the things Newport Academy social worker Caroline Fenkel hears from the teens working through eating disorders, cutting and other self-harm behaviors.

In some cases, kids hurt themselves because they want to feel something physical, including a temporary feeling of euphoria. Others may inflict an outward physical wound to show others how much despair they’re in but can’t express out loud. Sometimes, kids hurt themselves as self-punishment, whether with a physical wound or threatening comments they make about themselves on the internet.

“I have kids whose parents are very critical of them — they maybe find out they did something sexually, and then call them a whore, or engage in other name-calling,” Fenkel said. “My hunch is these things have been said in private, and they want to show the world what they think of themselves. Digital self-harm is a way for them to externalize the way they are feeling to others so they can see the amount of pain they are in.”

Self-bullies are victims as surely as those whose torment is inflicted by others, Hinduja and Fenkel both said, even as they compound the myth that bullying targets somehow invite the invective.

“I don’t think it should be taken lightly, but it is one of those situations where kids who engage in digital self-harm can be seen less empathetically by people — but why would you do that, demonize kids around this?” Fenkel said. “It’s similar to drug-addiction or some other form of self-harm. Kids aren’t waking up saying, ‘This is the day I’m going to cut myself until I die.’ ”

MOST KIDS FINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

The Cyberbully Research Center’s most recent statistics show 33 percent of American kids have been cyberbullied, and about 12 percent admit to cyberbullying someone else — behavior Hinduja said kids see in the world around them.

“They see adults doing the same thing and they think it’s OK,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.”

And it’s coming from multiple directions.

“There are a lot of individuals with a platform, not just politics but in athletics and celebrity world, who need to remember people look up to them and people will emulate the good and the bad,” he said. “Think carefully about what we say and how it is perceived, because it is planting seeds in the minds of youth and young adults.

“Parents are freaked out because they never have to time to get to know what’s going on, and there’s always going to be a new app that people can use to target kids. They just need to step up more. We all want kids to be decent human beings with a sensitive conscience and a moral compass — and if they’re struggling, we want them to know there is nothing to be ashamed of if they need help with some coping mechanisms.”

And there’s some good news parents can hold on to as they try to balance respect for their kids’ privacy with concern about harmful or dangerous social media habits: Suicide doesn’t happen in the vast majority of cyberbullying cases, Hinduja said.

“Among those kids who have taken their lives, it hasn’t been directly because of bullying or cyberbullying,” he said. “Those kids had atypical issues. They were on clinically prescribed drugs or psychotropic medication, or were struggling in some other capacity. It could be that that bullying or cyberbullying is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, but in all the research, there has not been a direct link.”

Instead, most kids have healthy, positive relationships online.

“It’s a minority of kids [who bully others or themselves] online,” he said. “The vast majority do the right thing, and aren’t clowning around.”

The question, he said, is this: “Can we marshal the power of peer pressure to induce more positive behavior among kids?”

THE MENACE OF BULLIES: PATCH SERIES

Over the coming year, Patch will look at the roles society plays in bullying and a child's unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes that we might offer solutions that save lives.

Do you have a story to tell? Email us at [email protected].

EARLIER IN THIS SERIES

• Bullied To Death: When Kids Kill With Words
• The Bully Menace: What Patch Readers Said
• Teen Tells Bullies In Video: 'Every Day, I Wear Your Words'
• Poetry Teacher Helps Bullied Kids Open Tortured Minds

Photo: Martin Moxter/imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock