If a child or teen is being sent nasty and mean messages, emails, flames, text messages or other electronic communications by another child or teen, that is called cyber bullying. Some people define it very strictly as a child to child or teen to teen thing, and say that adults doing the same to other adults is properly called cyber harrassment, or cyber stalking. I'm not so sure that's correct, however.
I think an adult can be cyberbullied just as much as a child could be. If the perpetrator hasn't matured beyond a high school mentality, and if the victim is caught unaware, it is easy to suddenly be slammed with some nasty things that drag you right back to feeling like a vulnerable kid. No one is perfect, and all of us have buttons that can be pushed.
I don't know if any of you saw it, but there was an attempt to bully me recently. It was interesting that the bully attempted to find a weakness to exploit. He asked me if I knew they all pm'd and emailed about me and laughed behind my back. Apparently he thought this would upset me a whole lot.
If I were 13 years old, that might bother me, but as far as I'm concerned they can pm and email and make jokes behind my back as much as they want! Who cares? I have never met this guy, though I do know, since I used to be on a forum he was on (until he got banned from that, too) that he's over 50 years old. A bit long in the tooth to be behaving like a 7th grade bully.
I guess there are always going to be people like this. That's too bad. I don't know how they got to be such unhappy people that they are made happy by trying to make others unhappy.
I did suffer some real, in-person bullying when I was in intermediate school. It sucked. However that experience has taught me how to recognize a bully. That's a good skill to have.
