Cyberbully, ABCmovie, on DVD, 2012. With Emily Osment, Kay Panabaker
This is an important movie for young people in middle school and beyond, who especially should relate, and for adults who should be able to learn from it. Cyberbully is about three teenaged girls whose friendship crumbles under the strain of online bullying. In turn, they victimize and are victimized in the context of a school social climate rife with peer pressure, cliques, and bullying.
The story takes several surprising and mostly plausible dramatic turns and seems to accurately pinpoint personalities, vulnerabilities, and intense emotions of Young Adults facing the gauntlet of their real and virtual social lives. Besides conveying story successfully this movies shows young adults how to identify and respond to bullying and models in a realistic way a parent muddling through and for the most part proactively addressing a teenager’s problems with online bullying.
The movie explores distinctions between real and online bullying, including that otherwise “good kids” may succumb to online bullying because of the anonymity factor. I’m guessing though that, on the flip side, perpetrators without conscience rarely come clean and admit what they’ve done, as this rarely occurs in real life, right? One could hope this movie might impact some perps, but it is more likely, as this movie also accurately portrays, that public exposure and social pressure will more effectively curb abuse of all kinds. To that end this movie also serves to encourage victims of bullying to confront real and virtual life bullies and bullying, and the movie actually introduces strategies for doing so.
