Teenage girls ‘ganging up’ on young boys in disturbing cyber-bullying trend called ‘roasting’
Tormentors are bombarding victims with abuse until they 'completely crack' under the strain, experts claim
Teenage girls are "ganging up" on young boys as part of a nasty online trend called "roasting", anti-bullying campaigners have warned.
The disturbing craze involves throwing abuse at victims' until they "completely crack", giving tormentors a chance to laugh at their pain.
Charlotte Robertson from the online safety group Digital Awareness UK that schools across Britain were in the grip of a roasting epidemic.
She said: "Roasting is done under the guise of good humour, which is why it is so dangerous because it is often done among friends.
"Someone would just lay into someone else and completely humiliate them but do it in a way that’s portrayed as humorous – a level up from banter."
Roasting campaigns are carried out entirely online and often involve starting websites or forums designed to mock people.
The victims are either locked out of these digital dungeons, making them feel excluded, or are shown the contents within them as well as images of people responding to the content.
Bullies often create "memes", which are images or short videos which are designed to be shared.
These will often incorporate the very darkest material from stories in the news, perhaps adding a child's face onto a murder victims' or editing them into a raunchy image taken from the internet.
A teenager's view on roasting, by 17-year-old Honor Munden
Roasting is described by the Urban Dictionary as "the act of verbally assaulting someone until you hurt their feelings". This might look like a severe form of cyber bullying to any adult, yet many teenagers believe the act of roasting is less serious.
Often, roasting is carried out between friends and involves them joking about each other's appearance or actions they may have taken.
In essence, what adults see as cyber bullying, young people see as a form of banter.
As the act of roasting has been encouraged by the very person who is subjected to it, they may feel the need to accept even the harshest comments without even realising they take the form of extreme cyber bullying.
A Youtube trend emerged in June this year in which famous 'vloggers' would roast themselves. This involved making harsh jokes about themselves whilst rapping to music.
Hit American vlogger Jenna Marbles created her own video, which included lines such as "Jenna Marbles, you were cool in 2012, the End, and whether or not you were cool was even questionable then".
The point at which roasting becomes cyber bullying is a fine line. A viral Reddit trend arose last year called 'Roast Me', in which ordinary people published photos of themselves and encouraged others to write comments about them.
But the line between roasting and cyber bullying becomes even more blurred in this situation. ChildLine believe 38% of children and teens will experience cyber bullying in their lifetime. It is possible that we all experience cyber bullying, yet there are those of us that associate it with 'roasting' and banter instead.
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“Girls will roast boys," Robertson added. "They will create an online chat room about another boy.”
“It’s very severe and people will ride on the back of what’s trending in world news.
“They will use killings or any bad news by way of inspiration to create a nasty meme about someone.”
Recent studies show girls are twice as likely than boys to be to the victims of cyber-bullying - but they are twice as likely to be the bullies themselves.
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