Cyberbullying And The Cousins Group

Almost every Pakistani family has a WhatsApp group called something like Khandaan, or Cousins, or Sirf Bhai Behan, or 47 unnamed members. It usually starts on the night of someone's wedding, when a chacha adds everyone he can find. By the third week, it is the place where rishtaydars share Eid greetings, election forwards, condolences when someone passes, and an enormous quantity of teasing. Teasing in our culture is a form of love. It is also, sometimes, the first place a young person learns what cyberbullying feels like.

Three lines. The first is teasing. Yaar your moochain are coming in like a Lyari rikshaw driver's. The second is teasing that lands harder than intended. Yaar after that diet you tried last summer you should not be eating biryani in your DP. The third is something else, when one cousin makes the same joke about another cousin every Friday for a year, when the joke targets her weight or her skin or her stutter or her family's money troubles, when other cousins start joining in and she stops responding. The third is no longer teasing. It has become bullying. The hardest part is that the line between the second and the third is not a wall. It is a slope, and groups slide down it slowly, often without anyone deciding to.

What it feels like to be the target. Imagine the cousin who has gained twenty kilos after a difficult medical year. Every Friday, in the cousins group, three older cousins post the same kind of joke. She laughs the first time. She does not laugh the third time, but types haha out of habit. By the tenth Friday, she dreads opening the group. She mutes it. She still opens it sometimes because she does not want to miss her grandmother's voice notes. Every time she opens it, she pays a small tax in her own self image. Multiply that by fifty Fridays in a year and you have a year of slow damage from people who would each, individually, swear they love her. This is exactly how families produce, without meaning to, the depression and the eating disorders that fill clinics in Lahore and Karachi.

What to do if the target is you. Three options, in order of difficulty. One, mute the group. This is not weakness. This is hygiene. You can stay in a group without reading every notification. Two, talk to the one cousin in the group you trust. Tell her, the jokes about my weight are landing harder than they look from outside. Ask her to push back next time. Most groups have one good ally. The good ally usually does not realise the situation is serious until someone names it. Three, tell an adult. The aunt who runs the family on WhatsApp, the mother who is calmest, the bhabhi who joined the family last year and sees it from outside. Adults can quietly change the temperature of a group in a way no teenager can. The first option costs nothing. The third option costs courage. None of them is wrong.

What to do if you have been the bully without realising. The honest sentence here is, most of us have been on this side of the line at least once. Some of us are still on it. The bigger the family group, the more likely it is that one cousin is paying a quiet tax for the entertainment of the rest. The fix is also not complicated. Stop the joke. Not slowly. Today. Send the cousin a private message. Yaar I think the moochain joke I keep making in the group lands worse than I meant it. Sorry. I will stop. Twenty four words. No long explanation. No request for forgiveness. Just an end. Most cousins, almost without exception, will reply with a softness you did not expect. The thing they wanted was for someone in the group to notice. You noticed.