Context · Social Media
A group chat is the main social space for most kids now, and it goes wrong in a specific way that is different from anything that happens face to face, because it is written down, it has an audience, and nobody has to watch the other person's face.
It is in writing and it does not fade
Something said out loud in a corridor is gone. The same words in a chat sit there to be scrolled back to, screenshotted and forwarded, so a single message keeps landing on your kid for weeks and they can reread it at two in the morning.
The audience does the damage
What hurts is usually not the person who typed it, it is the twenty people who saw it and the ones who added a reaction. That is also why telling a kid to just leave the chat lands so badly, because leaving means losing every conversation their friends are having, which costs more than the insult did.
Why nobody steps in
In a group of twenty, everybody assumes somebody else will say something, and a kid who defends the target risks becoming the next one. Knowing that helps you ask a better question than why did nobody stop it, which is whether anyone messaged your kid privately afterwards, because that is where the decent ones usually go.