No doubt there's all kinds of interesting statistics in here. I'd be interested in finding data about the age of the people harassing others. I doubt you'd see many 40-year-olds.
It's really crazy that we give adolescents all this latitude growing up -- they can't be tried as adults, their medical care is the responsibility of others, they are provided free food and medical care if needed, etc. -- and then we expect these same folks to go online and somehow behave like miniature adults. At any one time there's probably a thousand 12-year-olds living in crack houses that are online. And we expect them to behave the same way as a 30-year-old.
By no means am I condoning this kind of trash. But we can explain things without condoning them.
The internet is nice because nobody can tell anything about you, but when talking about things like this, that's not a good thing. There's a vast difference between being harassed by, say, people who are mentally barely able to care for themselves and being harassed by the guy who lives next door.
Anecdotal counter example: Google 'sweepyface' and you'll find the sad story of what I would describe as a conspiracy theorist who tweeted thousands of times regarding the Madeleine McCann (missing child) case. The technical question of whether she was trolling and harassing people or merely tweeting her views repetitively is up for debate but she was 63.
There's a vast difference between being harassed by, say, people who are mentally barely able to care for themselves and being harassed by the guy who lives next door.
Perhaps in terms of how that harassment should be dealt with, but not really in terms of how it affects the harassed.
