Cyberbullying or criminal conduct?

AuthorLuhtanen, Melissa L.
PositionSpecial Report: Legal Responses to Bullying

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, texting or similar means of communicating over the Internet have given new challenges to teachers, parents and most of all, youth. We tell youth to be cautious, to use their common sense, to not talk to strangers and to keep their personal information private. And yet these precautions, even when followed, do not always protect youth from cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is a serious issue in schools and in the after-school life of children as young as six years old.

However, part of the problem in preventing, punishing and educating on cyberbullying is the difficulty in finding a common definition of "cyberbullying", and the very real problem of downplaying Criminal Code offences as bullying.

In the past year the media has reported on at least two high profile cases that were labeled "cyberbullying", and that received mainstream media attention across Canada. One was the case of Amanda Todd, from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, who killed herself after being "cyber-bullied". Amanda Todd posted an eight-minute video where she explained, through flash cards how she and her friends were talking on a web-cam with another person. She was 12 years old and she playfully flashed her chest. The person on the other side of the web-cam turned out to be a grown man and not a young boy. He posted the image of her bare chest online. Then he stalked Amanda Todd every time she moved to a new school and sent out the video to her classmates. Bullies at school taunted Amanda Todd, with names such as "porn star". She hung herself in 2012, at age 15.

Rehtaeh Parsons was a Halifax teenager who also killed herself after events that were named "cyberbullying". Rehtaeh Parsons was allegedly gang raped. It has been reported that one of the boys took a photo of her being raped and distributed it to her classmates. The RCMP did not lay charges at the time. After the photo was distributed online, boys started texting and Facebooking Rehtaeh Parson asking her to have sex with them. She was bullied because of the pictures that were distributed online. Rehtaeh Parsons hung herself in April 2013.

The Nova Scotia Task Force reviewed many definitions of "bullying" and "cyberbullying" and recommended that the following definition be used for education and legislation in the province: (1)

Bullying is typically a repeated behaviour that is intended to cause, or should be known to cause, fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other forms of...

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