Cyberstalking can result in someone tracking your teen’s location, extorting sexual photographs, or even compelling them to meet up in person. In the most extreme cases, cyberstalking can tragically lead to human trafficking or harm. In all cases it will lead to personal drama in your teen’s life and affect their relationships and progress in school.

Cyberstalking is the misuse of technology to harass, stalk or threaten an individual. It can also be referred to as cyberbullying or cyberharassment. Perpetrators can target all ages and genders, though young people are more at risk through the various social media channels that cater to their demographic. Most people know their cyberstalkers—an ex-partner, a friend, a family member, a coworker. Cyberstalkers want to get the attention of their victim by any means necessary.

It’s important to take cyberstalking just as seriously as one would take stalking in the outside world, as it can cause severe distress, psychological damage and even an increased risk of suicide in young people. According to research, children and young people under 25 who are victims of cyberbullying are more than twice as likely to self-harm and enact suicidal behavior.

Intent of Cyberbullying

Those who choose to stalk or harass a victim online may be doing so for one or more of the following reasons:

To demean, embarrass or scare someone.
To track someone’s whereabouts without them knowing.
To try and “win back” an ex-partner through coercive efforts or threats. This is often seen with abusive ex-partners after a survivor has separated from them.
To damage a person’s reputation.
To get someone fired from a job or kicked out of school, sometimes as a form of financial control.
To make unwanted sexual advances.
To steal someone’s identity or impersonate them online.

Being a victim of stalking in the outside world is frightening, but we often feel a sense of safety once we get home and are able to lock the door behind us. Cyberstalking allows an abuser to circumvent physical barriers and invade a victim’s life from a distance. Cyberstalkers are well versed in hiding on the internet as well as covering their tracks, making reporting and prosecuting cyberharassment challenging.

What Does Cyberstalking Look Like

Online abuse can take many forms. It may look like:

Defamation: An abuser posts lies about an individual in an attempt to disparage his or her character.
Doxing: An abuser posts an individual’s private information, including full name, address, date of birth or social security number with the intent of harassing the individual or opening them up for others to commit crimes against them.
Financial abuse: With online banking and electronic bill pay, an abuser might take financial abuse to the Internet by interfering with an individual’s accounts, changing passwords, denying access to finances or even identity theft.
Harassment: Social media offers abusers a multitude of new ways to harass victims via private message, voice calls and public posts.
Google bombing: In this tactic, the perpetrator uses optimization to cause defamatory content to rise to the top of search results when someone Googles the victim’s name.
Online impersonation: This is when an abuser creates a fake account or hacks into a victim’s account and sends messages that appear to be coming from the victim. Often the messages are disparaging or defamatory in nature. Or, they may be used to cause turmoil between the victim and a third party.
Revenge porn: An abuser shares intimate photos or videos of a sexual partner that were obtained with or without consent during the relationship or when the abuser hacked into the victim’s computer, phone or online document storage.
Stalking: Abusers tracking the victim’s whereabouts through online “check-ins” or by installing GPS tracking on the victim’s phone and monitoring the location hits.
Threatening: This tactic is as old as time, but can now be done behind a veil of secrecy. Internet threats aren’t always taken seriously by online platforms or law enforcement but they do cause real anxiety in victims.
Unsolicited pornography: This occurs when an abuser sends unwanted pornography to a victim or posts it online, such as in an open-forum comment. It also includes sexualizing a photograph of the victim and posting it online.