US weighs criminal penalties for cyber-bullying.
Three major American social issues swirl in an internet maelstrom as the nation attempts to comprehend and deal with September’s rash of adolescent suicides. Bullying, which first drew national attention in the wake of January’s Phoebe Prince suicide, now links with unreconciled homophobia, and the legal juggernaut rolls along on well-worn First Amendment tracks as attorneys and law enforcement officials determine whether to criminalize bullying in-person and on the internet.
The statistics stagger the imagination. Experts estimate that one in three American adolescents either is a bully or is being bullied, and the internet has become the virtual playground on which the big kids beat up the smaller and weaker ones. Psychologists suggest that cyber-bullying is both easier and more intense because bullies do not witness the immediate pain they inflict; they cannot see the bruises and tears, so that they easily underestimate the effects of their slander and threats.
September suicide outbreak
During September, at least nine American teen-agers killed themselves as a direct result of bullying and intimidation by their peers. In all but one of those cases, boys and girls were harassed, assaulted, and slandered because of their sexuality. The youngest was only eleven years old. The internet, especially social networks, played a role in every case: Rumours spread via malicious texts, and threats routinely appeared on victims’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. In the most outrageous and widely publicized case, antagonists surreptitiously webcast a sexual encounter between two male Rutgers undergraduates. Publicly humiliated, Tyler Clementi, one of the men in the webcast, leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.
Writing in “The Huffington Post,” Stephen Balkam elegantly explains, “This tragic story involves an invasion of privacy, a form of live sexting, cyberbullying and an insidious form of homophobia. That the new technologies of web cams, tweets, iChat and Facebook were involved has both sensationalized and further complicated the way the media is handling his decision to take his own life. If we are to learn anything from this horrendous incident, we will need to look deeply into the social, psychological and technological forces that converged on this young man’s psyche.”
Criminal or civil penalties for bullying?
Forty-one American states have anti-bullying laws, but the country has no single standard or definition, and none of the laws specifically address issues of internet attacks. Many child advocates, ironically, oppose criminalizing bullying, because they fear the long-term consequences of saddling juveniles with criminal records. More importantly, they stress criminal punishment of a few offenders does not serve as warning for other bullies, because the adolescent mindset includes the idea “that never will happen to me.”
Brooke Sommerfield, a Southern California child advocate, suggests, “Civil litigation represents the best option for victims and their families, because every bullying incident is, almost by definition, a case of personal injury. I believe we should hold parents accountable for their children’s behaviour, and I think we should hold schools accountable for their negligence. A few hefty ‘wrongful death’ awards will send the strong message the community needs to hear.” Sommerfield emphasizes every act generally regarded as bullying already is recognized as a “tort” in civil law, and therefore gives victims and families grounds for filing suit.
