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It can be like sex education in school. We feel bored and there is the ‘eeew’ factor when an older adult starts talking about sex. 

It’s like that with social media and bullying. We feel bored when an adult starts going on about it. We know it goes on, but….

Bored with bullying

It is easy to get bored when adults go on about stuff we know about. We know, we shouldn’t bully other people. We know we should be careful who we speak to online.

It’s like we know we shouldn’t sext or send nude photos but then we start chatting to this cute guy or girl. We’re getting on really well and we want to keep them interested. All our friends seem to sext and send photos, so we figure it won’t matter. 

It’s like we know, and we get bored with everyone telling us what we already know, and then in that moment we forget all we know and do something we know we wouldn’t do, if we weren’t feeling bored, lonely, horny, or just like taking a risk.

Bored and bullying

We don’t think we are a bully, but we are feeling irritable and bored. We are annoyed because someone at school put us down or made fun of us. Perhaps it was the teacher and the student we can’t stand laughed too loudly and repeated it, in the break.

We want to get at them, we want to feel better, so we create a fake account and go online and troll them.

We know we shouldn’t do it but…

We justify it to ourselves by saying the person deserved it, but the simple fact is, we have been a bully.

Bullying and being a power for good.

It is easy when we are feeling bored, or when we feel put down by another person to go onto social media and take it out on other people. It is easy to do and in the short term we might feel better. We can laugh at what we think is our cleverness. But cruelty is never clever. In the end we will often feel worse, because we have done something we know we shouldn’t have done. We have engaged in bullying behaviour, rather than being a power for good.