Gaming aggression
Boys report aggression on gaming sites, where other players isolate them, turn on them and repeatedly tell them to kill themselves. Girls tell of logging-on to social networking sites to find threatening and insulting messages from bullies they know and bullies they don’t.
Sometimes, the pain becomes unbearable. In May of this year, Sayat.me, an app that enables children to hurl abuse at one another, was taken offline after it was blamed for the suicide of 15-year-old George Hessay from Goole, East Yorkshire.
Journey into mania
Ostensibly designed for businessmen and -women seeking unmediated feedback from colleagues and clients, it became hugely popular among teenagers. They may initially choose to take part… but they can’t choose to leave. In cyberspace, there’s nowhere to hide, and a craze can easily tip over into mania.
Consider the obscene Blue Whale challenge, which has been linked to the deaths of 130 teenagers in Russia. Players are given a “master” who controls them for 50 days, giving them a task to complete – watching horror movies all day, depriving themselves of sleep, cutting the image of a blue whale into their skin with a blade.
Positive feedback from the master on completion of a task triggers a form of Stockholm syndrome, so that when, on day 50, comes the instruction to “win” the challenge by killing themselves, what to do? Scores of girls have done just that.
It sounds far-fetched, dystopian, something that couldn’t happen here, and yet police in Britain have been warning schools to look out for signs.
