Some things hurt more, much more than a smack in the chops.

Online bullies are the most dangerous 'because abuse is 24-hour'

This should be good because the lie is immediately evident in the headline. Online abuse is not '24-hour'. Online abuse can be stopped at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse.

This subject is a little bug bear of mine. I was occasionally bullied at school. The bullying I was subjected to involved real flesh and blood people delivering a very swift and very hard punch in the face.

I wish that could have just been people calling me names over the internet. It would have been far less painful.

I use the internet a lot these days. With the blog, I actually put myself in a position for muppets to give me grief online. It's not a problem, I know which comments to respond to and how, and I know which ones to delete. I never get upset or offended because of some idiot with a potty mouth.

I use Facebook and Twitter and I have a public email address on my blog.

At no point have I ever become a 'victim' of cyberbullying. Abuse over the internet is the easiest kind of abuse to deal with, in extreme cases, by simply turning off the PC and going outside to do something a little less boring instead.

Victims of cyber-stalking suffer more than victims of 'traditional' bullying, research has found.
The inability to escape from the 24-hour online world and the public nature of threats posted on the internet make being bullied electronically more intense, it was claimed.

As I have already stated, 'traditional bullying causes actual physical pain and injuries, cyberbullying does not, and how are people unable to escape the online world?

What do folk do on Facebook? They gossip. A lot of them even spend the evening gossipping on Facebook to people they have spent all day at work with. There are many other ways to gossip.

Victims can feel stress, anxiety, fear and nightmares, as well as enduring eating and sleeping difficulties.

Really? A person that feels all this from online bullying is destined to be a victim. I wonder how they would cope with real physical violence?

But Dr Carll said the strengths of the internet being exploited by bullies could be turned against them.
She said: ‘The same technologies used to harass can also be used to intervene and prevent harassment.
‘Imagine a cell phone application that can tell you if someone threatening you is nearby.
‘That could be life-saving.’

Police and social services should do more to use electronic methods to stop online harassment, she added.

Yes, that's what we do these days. Pick a none problem and invite more police powers to make a tiny minority who can't fend for themselves feel a bit safer, all the while eroding the freedoms of society at large.

The internet is already heavily interfered with by the state far too much. They want full control, and as with the paedophile and terrorism scares used in real life to take our freedom, so can we use cyberbullying as a smokescreen to bring in internet regulation.

The lecture came after research showed 36 per cent of students at schools in South Korea had been bullied online at least once in the previous year.
Dr YeoJu Chung, of Kyungil University, said: ‘The results revealed that cyber-bullying makes students socially anxious, lonely, frustrated, sad and helpless.

Interesting. I bet everyone reading this has had some sort of abuse thrown at them over the web in the past year. I know I have, it's part and parcel of writing or reading in the blogosphere. I also bet that none of my readers have felt any of the above emotions as a result. I would say mirth is more likely than helplessness among my readers.

I would suggest that 24 hour use of sites like Facebook as a substitute for real relationships is more likely to be the cause of social anxiety, loneliness, frustration and helplessness than bullying.

A fifth of [British] children aged six to nine reported being the victim of ‘aggressive or unpleasant’ behaviour online. This is partly because children in the UK use social networks for longer than any other country.

Maybe children aged six to nine should not be allowed to have unrestricted access to the internet. Young children in that age gap need to be forming relationships in the real world before they loose the ability to do so.

I have no children of my own but I am of the opinion that maybe children under the age of ten should not be allowed on social networking sites at all; that maybe the computer should only be used for homework and learning at that age. What say you, parents?

In the meantime, here's a little advice for anyone suffering online bullying: