PSY 200: Developmental Psychology
5 October 2015
Article Summary 1: Cyberbullying In the article “An Overview of Cyberbullying in Higher Education,” written by Edwina Thomas Washington in 2014, she explains and deals with the issue of cyberbullying not just in K-12 years, but in college years as well. Throughout the article she explains cyberbullying as it “involves using communications technology to send or post harmful, cruel, or false text messages or images using the internet to harm a victim,” versus traditional bullying which she describes as "face-to-face, physical, and verbal.” The article begins by discussing and explaining exactly what cyberbullying is and what affect it has on the victims involved. She states that one in four American adults fall victim to cyberbullying and it can led to many tragic outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, suicide, and quitting their jobs. Washington then goes into great detail about three tragic incidences that have occurred in connection to cyberbullying involving college students. The first incident led to the male victims being embarrassed by one girl’s fake thesis involving them, the second incident led to a male student committing suicide from being spied on with another male, and the third incident forced a popular male victim to make a statement about his experience dating a “girl” online for three years to find out it had been a male all along. She then begins to form a relationship between traditional bullying and cyberbullying, in which she says “traditional bullying may predicate cyberbullying.” The article then focuses on studies that researchers have conducted in colleges, basically to see the percent of people who have been bullied, who bully, and who know someone who has been bullied and laws that can help reduce these numbers. Finally, the information presented in this article informs adult educators