n the case of adults, Patchin says, cyberbullying behavior is less about coping with personal problems, however, and more about gaining status or reputation among certain circles. “Neither kids nor adults, I don’t think, would bully another person unless they thought it would be valuable to them,” he explains. Which leads to Trump: “If the president believed that his tweets would cause people not to vote for him, he wouldn’t do it,” Patchin says. “It’s not just that he’s not worried about political or social backlash. But, more than that, he must think it’ll benefit him in some way.”
According to several surveys, adolescent girls are more likely than boys to experience cyberbullying. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that young women aged 18 to 24 “experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels,” especially on social media; about a quarter of them had been stalked online and had been victims of online sexual harassment. Working to Halt Online Abuse, a nonprofit that fields online harassment complaints, says 72.5 percent of the cyberbullying incidents recorded from 2000-12 were reported by women. With Trump, too, it is women—and women’s bodies—that seem to be most viciously attacked. His tweet at Brzezinski was clearly meant to humiliate a woman based on her appearance, first implying that she needed to improve her looks with plastic surgery and then evoking the image of her altered face, warped and bloodied. Trump has also described Rosie O’Donnell as “fat,” “dumb” and “a loser,” Arianna Huffington as “unattractive inside and out,” and Megyn Kelly as “average in every way.” During the campaign, he tweeted that Hillary Clinton “doesn’t even look presidential.” [...]
Last week, officials from both parties issued statements to that effect: House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, and more. But Bazelon argues that these “pro forma” statements, as she puts it, aren’t enough—the condemnation needs to come from closer to the president. Nicolle Wallace, an alumna of the George W. Bush administration and now a host on MSNBC, called on female members of the Trump administration like Dina Powell, Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos to “work behind the scenes to educate” the president. None of those women, nor anyone in the Trump family, however, has done so. Ivanka Trump was silent, and Melania Trump’s spokeswoman’s response was: “When her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.” What are our children supposed to glean from this, asks Patchin—“If someone bullies you, bully them worse?”
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