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Bullying is physical, verbal, or psychological attacks or intimidation against a person who cannot properly defend himself or herself. It involves tw

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This Boy Was Getting Bullied. How These Strangers Reacted Will Shock You (Keaton Jones)

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Who will stop the bullying? After the recent events that happened with Keaton Jones being bullied, I decided to conduct a social experiment seeing how people would react if they saw a child being bullied in public. The results were shocking! Subscribe: https://goo.gl/kxeJ0e Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matthewband...

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What Can We Do? Bias, Bullying, & Bystanders

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In What Can We Do? students share put-downs that they hear in school: "You're gay." "Your skin is too brown." "Fatty." "Your religion is fake." "Estúpido." Watch as educators model how to engage students in real conversations about bias-based bullying and standing up for each other wtih HRC Welcoming Schools lesson plans.

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Bullies and bystanders, what experts say...

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Bullies and bystanders, what experts say...

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bullies and bystanders, what experts say movie - Yahoo Video Search Results

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Introduction

In September 2019, Channing Smith, a 16-year-old high school student from Manchester, Tennessee, killed himself. Days before his suicide, his classmates had outed him as bisexual by sharing sexually explicit text messages Smith had exchanged with a male classmate on social media. At a memorial service, his family condemned cyberbullying-a growing epidemic-and criticized the local district attorney for not bringing forth criminal charges against anyone in the case. The family also held school administrators accountable for failing to prevent the bullying and for not adequately punishing Smith's alleged bullies.

Smith's death, which garnered national attention, was the latest in a string of suicides of adolescents and teenagers who have suffered cyberbullying. The Cyberbullying Research Center, a group that tracks the prevalence of online harassment and laws affecting it, defines cyberbullying as "willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices." Cyberbullying methods can range from sending hurtful or threatening text messages to spreading rumors online or posting embarrassing photos or videos on Facebook, Instagram, or other social media sites. More than 36 percent of around 5,000 middle and high school students surveyed by the Cyberbullying Research Center in 2019 reported having been cyberbullied, and almost 15 percent admitted to having cyberbullied someone else. The survey found that cyberbullying is a growing problem because of the increasing frequency with which students use the Internet and cell phones to socialize.

Although children and adolescents have long struggled with cruelty at school, cyberbullying has presented educators and legislators with unique challenges. The increasing frequency with which students use the Internet and cell phones to do homework and contact friends means that bullying has spilled over the physical boundaries of the schoolyard and can potentially affect nearly every hour of a victim's day. Indeed, the Cyberbullying Research Center survey showed, the percentage of students victimized by cyberbullying nearly doubled from 2007 to 2019. Cyberbullies can often maintain anonymity, and the potential for an embarrassing photo or video to go viral expands the audience of such bullying beyond a victim's classmates.

Schools nationwide have spent millions of dollars over the last decade on anti-bullying campaigns, but cyberbullying represents a threat that parents, school administrators, and legislators alike are unsure of how to handle. All 50 states have some form of anti-bullying statute on their books, and almost every state prohibits electronic harassment, but the extent to which prosecutors are filing criminal charges against cyberbullies in courts has varied widely.

Some argue that efforts to teach young people courtesy and tolerance are the best way to prevent cyberbullying. In May 2018, First Lady Melania Trump, wife of President Donald Trump (R), launched "Be Best," a campaign to promote online civility and combat bullying among youth. "It is our responsibility as adults to educate and remind [children] that when they are using their voices, whether verbally or online," she said when announcing the initiative at the White House, "they must choose their words wisely and speak with respect and compassion."

Others, however, contend that only taking cyberbullies to court will send the message that harassing classmates online is a serious -and potentially fatal - offense. In the aftermath of Channing Smith's death, his father urged Tennessee to enact a law that would hold cyberbullies criminally responsible for their actions. "This was a premeditated assault by electronic means," he told a local news channel. "Their intent was to humiliate and embarrass him and cause great mental anguish."

Should cyberbullies be prosecuted?

Supporters of prosecuting cyberbullies argue that cyberbullying can cause severe emotional and psychological harm that can, at times, prove deadly. Cyberbullies maliciously target their victims, they note, revealing personal information on the Internet or harassing them through frequent or threatening messages with the intent of causing embarrassment and pain. Schools and parents, they assert, are often unable to step in, leaving it to the criminal justice system to stop invasions of privacy or harassment by cyberbullies. States, they argue, must pass anti-bullying laws allowing prosecutors to charge perpetrators with crimes.

Opponents of prosecuting cyberbullies argue that criminalizing online behavior risks infringing on the right to free speech as protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Cyberbullying, they argue, is a dilemma best solved by schools and parents, not the courts. Prosecutors tend to press charges in cyberbullying cases that end in suicide, they note, but defendants should be prosecuted only for their own actions, not for those of their victims. Instead of prosecuting a few cyberbully scapegoats in highly publicized cases, they argue, the public should concentrate on teaching all young people how to practice tolerance and civility.

What Is Cyberbullying?

Most anti-bullying legislation stipulates that, for an action to constitute bullying, it must involve repeated harassment with the demonstrable intent to hurt the victim, whether physically or psychologically. Like other kinds of bullying, cyberbullying is meant to do harm, using such electronic devices as computers and cell phones. Cyberbullying began in small, online chat rooms, the Cyberbullying Research Center reports, but the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube has provided cyberbullies with major venues that reach millions of people.

Cyberbullying can come in many forms. Cyberharassment, for example, refers to the repeated sending of hurtful emails, direct messages, or text messages. Another form of cyberbullying is impersonation, in which cyberbullies pretend to be their victims online in order to sully their reputations. Cyber denigration occurs when a cyberbully spreads derogatory or untrue information about someone online or digitally posts an embarrassing or altered photo or video of that person. Nearly 60 percent of teenaged students have experienced at least one of six types of abusive online behaviors, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in September 2018 revealed, including offensive name-calling, spreading of false rumors, receiving explicit images they did not ask for, constant harassment, physical threats, or having explicit images of them shared without their consent.

Besides being perpetrated in cyberspace, cyberbullying differs from physical bullying in several ways. A cyberbully may be able to act anonymously by, for example, creating a fake profile on a social networking site. According to some experts, the potential to be anonymous online can embolden bullies while intensifying victims' fears. "Internet culture, with its avatars and screen names," Time magazine journalist Bonnie Rochman wrote in October 2010, "can cultivate a sense of anonymity that allows people-especially teens who lack the biological ability to consistently predict the consequences of their actions-to act in ways they wouldn't face to face."

Moreover, while a traditional bully might be able to embarrass his or her victim in front of a few other schoolmates, cyberbullies have the ability to humiliate their targets-whether through a rumor, embarrassing photograph, or mocking video-in front of potentially thousands or even millions of viewers.

Unlike traditional bullying, cyberbullying can occur practically all the time. While victims of traditional bullying at school can usually find refuge at home, those who suffer cyberbullying can face harassment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Cyberbullies' ability "to attack their targets even after their actual physical contact ends...makes it hard for victims to find a safe haven," Marlene Sandstrom, a psychology professor at Williams College, wrote in the New York Times in 2010. "Walking away from the perpetrator, avoiding contact, or finding a protective ally...no longer does the trick."

Other observers, however, contend that cyberbullying is merely an updated form of old-fashioned adolescent harassment. "Cyberbullying is just bullying that happens to be mediated through digital technologies," John Palfrey, a law professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in the New York Times in 2010. "There's nothing fundamentally different about it." While studies have shown that the number of cyberbullying incidents has risen, he noted, that does not necessarily mean that bullying overall is increasing. "We...can't say," Palfrey continued, "that kids are meaner today than they were in the past."

It is apparent, however, that bullying has gone electronic because the social lives of young people have moved online. While teenagers in previous decades primarily socialized at school or in other public spaces such as parks and malls, now much of the social lives of young people occurs online, on social networking apps such and through text messages. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2018 found that 95 percent of adolescents aged 13 to 17 went online daily and 45 percent reported being online "almost constantly," up from 24 percent in 2015. The likelihood of teenagers facing harassment on the web, the study revealed, increased alongside the amount of time spent online. Sixty-seven percent of teenagers who reported being online almost constantly said they had been cyberbullied, compared to 53 percent of those who reported going online only sporadically. Cyberbullying, the Pew study found, was more prevalent among girls than boys. Thirty-nine percent of girls surveyed reported having been cyberbullied, compared with 26 percent of boys.

For students who identify as part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, victim rates are even higher. In 2017, nearly 27 percent of lesbian, gay, or bisexual students were cyberbullied, according to an annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a government agency. A study by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a group that works to end bullying of LGBT students, reported in 2016 that routinely cyberbullied LGBT youth are less likely to complete high school and are twice as likely to skip school as a result of feeling unsafe or uncomfortable in that environment.

Many students do not report bullying incidents because they fear retribution, think school officials or authorities would be unable to help them, or believe that their parents will take away their phones. Indeed, only 43 percent of bullied students report being harassed, the National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2015, and experts urge parents to look out for behavioral signals from their children that may indicate something is wrong. "[Students] may increase use of their devices and social media (because they are freaked out) or they may significantly decrease their use (again, because they are freaked out)," Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, told Salon in March 2018. "Ideally, an open line of communication has been built over years so that the child knows they can come to the parent with any issue that arises in their lives, and the parent will be non-judgmental, non-critical, understanding, and helpful."

Amid ongoing pressure, social media platforms have struggled to crack down on cyberbullying. Most social media platforms allow users to report instances of harassment or abuse, but removing cruel content can be a lengthy and difficult process. It can be a challenge, many observers have noted, for social media companies to safeguard cyberbullying victims while also protecting freedom of speech on their platforms.

In July 2019, Instagram, which has a younger user base than Facebook, launched a "War on Bullying," a campaign to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and curtail bullying, shaming, insults, and disrespectful posts, rather than waiting for users to report them. With new words and behaviors cropping up online among teenagers almost constantly, however, the development of AI capable of identifying cyberbullying will be a complex process, and the company noted it would still need humans to identify harassment on its platform. "Our algorithms," Bettina Fairman, Instagram's director of community operations, told the New York Times in May 2019, "aren't yet as good as people when it comes to understanding context."

Cyberbullying Leads to Suicide, Prosecution

In several high-profile cases, instances of cyberbullying have ended in tragedy, bringing widespread publicity to the problem and in some cases leading to criminal charges against perpetrators of online harassment. In 2008, a cyberbullying case concerning a Missouri woman, 49-year-old Lori Drew, garnered national media attention. After Drew's daughter and a neighbor's daughter, 13-year-old Megan Meier, had a falling out, Drew and two other people set up a fake profile on MySpace, a social media site, under the name Josh Evans. "Josh" contacted Megan routinely, flirting with her, before eventually turning on her and saying that "the world would be a better place" without her in it. Shortly after receiving that message, Megan-who suffered from clinical depression-killed herself.

Citing a lack of evidence, Missouri prosecutors declined to charge Drew with Megan's death. The federal government then decided to pursue the case in California, where MySpace was based. Prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Drew with one count of conspiracy and three violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to prevent hacking. Drew, they argued, had violated MySpace's terms of use, which stipulated that users provide truthful information when registering for a profile on the site. That violation of rules, they claimed, constituted "unauthorized access" to the site, a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In November 2008, Drew was convicted on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for misrepresenting herself on MySpace.

Some observers, however, questioned the convictions. Few Internet users regularly read the terms of use on all the websites they join, they noted, and sometimes it can be beneficial for users of such sites to present false information to protect their privacy. In 2009, a federal judge threw out Drew's convictions, ruling that laws criminalizing violations of websites' terms of service are too vague to be constitutional.

In January 2010, Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old high school student in South Hadley, Massachusetts, hanged herself after being bullied both at school and on Facebook. District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel prosecuted seven students for bullying Prince, charging them with stalking, criminal harassment, and civil rights violations. At the time of the incident, Massachusetts was one of a few states that had not adopted anti-bullying legislation. In May 2010, Massachusetts-partly in response to the highly publicized suicide-passed an anti-bullying statute worded broadly enough to encompass out-of-school bullying, including cyberbullying, as long as such harassment "materially or substantially disrupts the education process or the orderly operation of a school." [See Massachusetts Passes Strict Anti-bullying Law (primary source)]

Four months later, in September 2010, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, jumped to his death. Several days before the suicide, his roommate, Dharun Ravi, and Ravi's friend Molly Wei had streamed footage online from a webcam hidden in Ravi's and Clementi's dorm room. The streaming video showed Clementi having a romantic encounter with another man. Prosecutors in Middlesex County, New Jersey, charged Ravi and Wei with invasion of privacy, which carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Some observers protested the charges, saying the incident was merely a youthful prank gone awry. Others, meanwhile, accused Ravi and Wei of homophobia and urged the county attorneys to prosecute them for hate crimes and even manslaughter. Ravi was convicted in 2012, served 20 days in prison, and was ordered to pay $10,000 to a program that helps victims of hate crimes. He was not, however, charged for Clementi's death as Clementi made no mention of him in his suicide note. Additional charges were filed, and in 2016, Ravi pleaded guilty to attempted invasion of privacy and was sentenced to time already served.

Clementi's suicide, which garnered national attention, followed at least three other widely reported suicides of teenagers that month. All of them had been bullied either for being openly gay or for being presumed to be gay. Later in September, Education Secretary Arne Duncan hosted a Bullying Prevention Summit in Washington, D.C. In his speech at the summit, Duncan noted that the administration of President Barack Obama (D, 2009-17) had requested an increase in funding for anti-bullying programs. In October 2010, President Obama posted a video on the White House website expressing his shock at the string of bullying and suicides, and said he hoped society would progress from considering bullying to be "a normal rite of passage."

Cyberbullying-related suicides, however, continued throughout the decade. In November 2016, Brandy Vela, an 18-year-old high school student from Houston, Texas, killed herself. Her bullies, who targeted her for being overweight, had sent her abusive text messages for months using an untraceable smartphone application and created fake pages of her on social media. Prior to her death, her family had reported the harassment to the Texas City Independent School District and the Texas City Police Department, yet the bullying had persisted. In March 2017, Vela's former boyfriend, Andres Arturo Villagomez, and his girlfriend, Karinthya Sanchez Romero, were arrested and charged with "unlawful disclosure or promotion of intimate visual material" and "stalking and online impersonation."

In June 2017, Mallory Grossman, a 12-year-old cheerleader and gymnast from Rockaway Township, New Jersey, took her own life after being taunted for months through text messages, Instagram posts, and Snapchat by a group of sixth grade girls who called her "fat" and "jiggly" and asked her to kill herself. Despite her parents' pleas to her teachers, school counselors, and even the bullies' parents, the harassment continued. A year after Mallory's death, her parents sued the school district and several school officials for wrongful death. The lawsuit became the first cyberbullying suicide case tried in New Jersey, a state with one of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the country. "We are hopeful that the filing of this lawsuit will bring national awareness to the epidemic of cyberbullying," Bruce Nagel, the Grossmans' attorney, announced at a press conference in June 2018, "and that we do not have to attend any more funerals of students who have been the victims."

Mallory's mother, meanwhile, started "Mallory's Army," a nonprofit group that advocates for the criminalization of cyberbullying. In June 2019, the New Jersey Senate unanimously passed Mallory's Law, which would require all accounts of bullying to be reported to the county superintendent and the parents of all students involved. The law would also allow the parents of bullies to be fined and would require them to take training classes with their children. Some towns in other states already had similar measures in place. In Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, for example, parents of bullies can be fined $50 for the first offense. Parents in North Tonawanda, New York, can be fined $250 or face up to 15 days in jail if their child bullies other minors. Mallory's Law has yet to be considered by the New Jersey General Assembly.

In October 2019, a teenaged boy at Wallkill Valley Regional High School in New Jersey was arrested and charged with one count of cyberharassment. He had allegedly told a girl at a nearby elementary school to take her own life on Snapchat after she posted messages about suicide prevention. The girl had reported the incident to school authorities. If found guilty, the boy would have to, as New Jersey law stipulates, attend training programs on the dangers of cyberbullying. "I'm glad they arrest[ed] him," one local resident told CBS New York. "If you have the mentality to do this as a teenager what are you gonna do when you're an adult?" But another resident called the incident "a little extreme. Kids make mistakes. It's the only way we learn in life."

In response to the rise in cyberbullying, some states have moved to strengthen laws that criminalize online harassment. In April 2019, for example, Maryland updated a cyberbullying law that prohibited "anyone from using electronic media (computers, tablets, phones, etc.) to maliciously engage in conduct that inflicts serious emotional distress on a minor and/or places that minor in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury." Known as Grace's Law, the measure had originally been passed in 2013 following the suicide of Grace McComas, a 15-year-old from Howard County, Maryland, who killed herself after months of being harassed over text message by someone who had sexually assaulted her. The updated version of the law made it easier to criminally prosecute cyberbullying and increased maximum penalties to a 10-year sentence and $10,000 fine from a 1-year sentence and $500 fine.

Some psychologists have framed cyberbullying as just one element of the broader challenges surrounding teenagers and social media use. In a study of teen suicide published in Clinical Psychological Science in November 2017, researchers found that, after having declined for nearly two decades, the suicide rate among American teenagers had surged between 2010 and 2015-a five-year period that also saw a huge increase in social media activity. The researchers found that 36 percent of the teenagers surveyed in 2015 reported considering suicide or feeling "desperately sad or hopeless" after being online, compared to 32 percent in 2009. In November 2018, similarly, a research team led by psychologist Melissa Hunt at the University of Pennsylvania published the results of a survey in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology that linked increased Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat use to decreased emotional well-being among young adults. "There's an enormous amount of social comparison that happens [online]," Hunt noted in a statement. "When you look at other people's lives, particularly on Instagram, it's easy to conclude that everyone else's life is cooler or better than yours." Decreased use of social media, the researchers argued, could lead to significant reductions in depression and loneliness.

Supporters Argue: Cyberbullies Should Be Prosecuted

Supporters of prosecuting cyberbullies argue that teenagers who electronically victimize their peers lack empathy and that they intentionally harass victims as a way to assert power and cause pain. Students have a fundamental right to be free from this kind of abuse, they contend, and cyberbullies must be held legally accountable for their actions. "When you bully on the internet, [judicial] consequences are very limited," Michigan state representative Peter Lucido (R), who sponsored a bill to criminalize cyberbullying, told the Associated Press in March 2018. "When you're dealing with these cases day in and day out, the police want some type of mechanism to help."

The breadth and reach of online harassment, advocates of prosecution assert, can make cyberbullying particularly harmful. "Ubiquitous electronic communications and personal information proliferating on the Internet can result in invasions of privacy, with devastating consequences," Daniel K. Gelb, a lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote in the New York Times in 2011.

That information can remain searchable and retrievable, potentially forever. The victim of cyberbullying cannot escape the Internet [which is] such a major part of modern life, and the technology affords the bully more tools for harassment (email, instant and text messaging, social networks and mobile media, etc.). Worse, bullies can exploit social networking platforms to gang up on victims. Abus[e] on these forums can lead to extreme emotional stress and mental anguish, even culminating in the victim committing suicide.

It is possible to distinguish teenagers who are merely being thoughtless from those who have carried out premeditated acts of cruelty, proponents of prosecution argue, and press charges appropriately. Malcolm Lazin, the executive director of Equality Forum, a gay rights advocacy group based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, stated that the students who harassed Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University in New Jersey by live streaming his romantic encounter with another man, for example, deserved to be put on trial. "Clearly, what they did was premeditated," Lazin told the New York Times in October 2010. "This was not a visceral response. This was something well thought out, executed and then put on the worldwide Internet."

Penalizing abuse in cyberspace, advocates of prosecution contend, should be no different than punishing abuse in real life. "[W]e have laws criminalizing stalking, sexual harassment, identity theft and more when it takes place in person and online," Representative Linda Sanchez (D, California), who in 2008 introduced legislation to make any electronic communication meant "to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person" a felony, wrote in the Hill in 2009. "All of these actions have consequences. But there is one serious online offense that has no penalty-cyberbullying. Do we not think it is as serious because it takes place in cyberspace and not face to face?"

Cyberbullies who post deeply personal information about their victims online with the intent of causing psychological harm, proponents of prosecution argue, deserve punishment. Clementi's harassers "had to know that outing a reclusive 18-year-old on the Web would be emotionally explosive," Lazin told the New York Times. "As a society we should not tolerate-whether straight or gay-this invasion of the most basic privacy and its malicious exploitation on the Internet."

Supporters of prosecuting cyberbullies note that school administrators are often aware of bullying but take no meaningful action to stop it. The family of Mallory Grossman, a 12-year-old who took her life in 2017 after being cyberbullied, for example, had filed numerous complaints with the school about the situation that went unheeded. "There was a pattern," Mallory's mother told the Washington Post in August 2017, "...of the school dismissing my concerns." Had a strong anti-cyberbullying law been in effect, supporters argue, administrators might have intervened more forcefully.

To hold cyberbullies accountable, proponents contend, prosecutors need new, well-crafted laws that empower them to file charges against those who abuse others online. Prosecutors charging Lori Drew, the Missouri woman who cyberbullied her daughter's classmate in 2008, for example, had to resort to using an outdated, federal anti-hacking statute because no existing state legislation covered her actions. "The law must evolve to address how our society communicates," Gelb wrote, "promoting proper conduct, and deterring future bullying with a legal means to punish those who cause harm."

Supporters of tougher laws further argue that parents of cyberbullies should also be held liable for their children's actions. "If a child kills someone while operating a parent's car, the parents can be held responsible," Mark O'Mara, a CNN legal analyst, wrote in 2013.

If a child kills someone while using a parent's gun, the parent can be held responsible. If a child breaks the law using a computer or cell phone provided by the parent, how is that different? Parents need to understand that the technology they give to their children can be used to break the law and inflict harm. Parents need to understand that allowing their children the privilege of going online comes with responsibility and liability.

Opponents Argue: Cyberbullies Should Not Be Prosecuted

Opponents of prosecuting cyberbullies argue that dragging misguided youths into court is not an effective solution to the problem of online harassment. Schools, not courts, should be responsible for ending such abusive action. "It is important to turn around the behavior of the bullying student," Nicholas Carlisle, the founder of No Bully, an anti-bullying advocacy group, told Patch in October 2019.

[S]chool is the primary lever for turning bullying around.... We tell them they're not in trouble, and walk them in the shoes of the students who are being bullied.... 98 percent of kids are wired for empathy, and they have a profound sense of fairness. If you create the right conditions, they will step in to end the bullying.

Instead of saddling young people with criminal records for their mistakes, critics assert, it is better to help them through education and civility programs. "Passing new laws to criminalize bullying will only lead to kids leaving school with a record instead of a diploma," Robert Trestan, a civil rights lawyer for the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that defends civil liberties, wrote in the New York Times in October 2010. "Schools must develop strategies to teach children about cyberbullying and its impact, mechanisms for prevention and response need to be established, and everyone in our schools must be trained."

Statutes that outlaw cyberbullying, opponents contend, risk violating people's right to free speech. "In the grief and outrage that fuels [sic] our emotions, we must not forget about the constitutional freedoms all of us enjoy," Trestan wrote. "Too often a rush to judgment has infringed on those rights."

Criminalizing online expression, critics charge, runs contrary to ideas of individual freedom. "Human malevolence is a problem the law can't solve and often can't even punish, without grievous infringements on liberty," Wendy Kaminer, a civil libertarian and author, wrote in the Atlantic in September 2009. "The cost of a right to feel good about yourself is everyone's right to be free." Although the actions of cyberbullies may often be "unforgivable," she wrote, they should not be considered criminal.

Those who favor prosecuting people for online bullying, opponents argue, irrationally want to criminalize what is typical schoolyard behavior simply because it happens in cyberspace. At a House hearing in 2009, Representative Louie Gohmert (R, Texas) called a proposed cyberbullying bill "another chapter of over-criminalization." He said, "When a bully beats up a smaller student and the smaller student goes home, gets on the Internet and says the playground bully is mean, ugly and stupid, it's the smaller student victim that has now probably committed a federal felony under this proposed law."

Critics note that prosecutors will be most likely to level charges against cyberbullies whose victims kill themselves. But cyberbullies, opponents insist, should not be punished for the actions of their victims, which are beyond their control. Although suicide is a tragic response to cyberbullying, Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University and a former federal prosecutor, wrote in the New York Times in 2010, "It is also a rare response." He continued:

Of the millions of children who suffer bullying, few take their own lives. Bullies "cause" suicides in the same way that a man "causes" the suicide of a lover he spurns. The criminal law typically does not hold people responsible for outcomes that are idiosyncratic or unpredictable.... Every tragedy doesn't have to result in somebody going to jail.

Schools and parents must be responsible for policing children's online activity, opponents contend, not courts and legislatures. "The vast majority of cyberbullying incidents can and should be handled informally," Justin Patchin, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and a professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, wrote in the New York Times in 2010, "with parents, schools, and others working together to address the problem before it rises to the level of a violation of criminal law."

Parental liability laws are futile and wrongheaded, critics maintain, because parents instinctively defend their own children they are labeled a bully. "Most parents of bullies do not identify that child as a bully," Carlisle explained. "The problem with legislation...is that it turns parents into enemies. In 90 percent of the cases, the parents say that child did not start it and that child is not a bully. There's no research that shows it will work, with parents or kids involved in a particular incident."

Taking cyberbullies to court is not only an overzealous response to the problem, opponents argue, but is also a distraction from more effective strategies to address it. "If the only tool you have is prison, then every problem looks like a crime," Butler explained. "A national conversation about the importance of civility and respect would be a more effective tribute to [Rutgers student] Tyler Clementi than trying to prosecute his bullies for manslaughter. They acted meanly, and possibly even criminally, but not homicidally."

Parents, Websites Fight Cyberbullying

Experts have urged parents to become more educated about the websites and smartphone applications that define much of their children's social lives, learn to recognize warning signs that their children are being harassed, speak with their children about refraining from cyberbullying, and denounce it when others commit it. Some experts on bullying have also urged educators and other adults to be cognizant of the fact that bullies often act out as a form of asking for help because of pain or uncertainty at home. "Children being bullied need help," Mildred Peyton, an author of books on surviving bullying, told the New York Times in September 2019, "and oftentimes so do the bullies-their behavior is often indicative of instability in their own lives."

Social networks and other popular websites, meanwhile, have adopted measures to protect users against abuse. In July 2019, Instagram introduced the "restrict" feature, which prompts users to rethink offensive comments before posting them. It also allows users to approve a restricted person's comments before they are visible to others. Snapchat's Parental Controls feature, in turn, gives parents control over what their children post online and who can access this information and contact them. Meanwhile, Facebook's Safety Center allows users to hide or delete content they find unwelcome, offensive, or hurtful. Facebook also lets users report cyberbullying on behalf of friends who are hesitant to complain themselves.

As schools, parents, prosecutors, and social media companies struggle to combat cyberbullying, calls for stronger action continue. It remains to be seen how online harassment in the United States will be addressed on the local, state, and federal levels.

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Hu, Winnie. "Legal Debate Swirls Over Charges in a Student's Suicide." New York Times, October 1, 2010, www.nytimes.com.

Kaminer, Wendy. "Liberty, Self-Esteem and Self-Governance." Atlantic, September 30, 2009, www.theatlantic.com.

Karlis, Nicole. "Teen Suicides Rise in Tandem with Cyberbullying-And Advocates Have Had Enough." Salon, March 11, 2018, www.salon.com.

Kim, Richard. "On Loving Queer Kids." Nation, November 1, 2010, www.thenation.com.

Kowalski, Robin, et al. "Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age." Cyberbully Help, 2007, www.cyberbullyhelp.com.

Myers, Gene. "Anti-Bullying Bill, Mallory's Law, Unanimously Passes NJ Senate." Daily Record, June 25, 2019, www.dailyrecord.com.

"New Jersey School Sued Over Bullied Girl's Suicide." BBC, June 20, 2018, www.bbc.com.

"N.J. High School Student Accused of Encouraging Elementary School Student to Kill Herself." CBS New York, October 22, 2019, www.newyork.cbslocal.com.

O'Mara, Mark. "Should Parents Be Criminally Liable for Kids' Cyberbullying?" CNN, October 20, 2013, www.cnn.com.

Palfrey, John. "Solutions Beyond the Law." New York Times, October 1, 2010, www.nytimes.com.

"Prosecuting Cyber Bullies." National Public Radio, April 5, 2009, www.npr.org.

Sanchez, Linda. "Protecting Victims, Preserving Freedoms." Hill, May 6, 2009, www.thehill.com.

Sandstrom, Marlene. "More Insidious Harassment." New York Times, September 30, 2010, www.nytimes.com.

Schmidt, Samantha. "After Months of Bullying, Her Parents Say, a 12-Year-Old New Jersey Girl Killed Herself. They Blame the School." August 4, 2017, Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com.

Schwartz, John. "Bullying, Suicide, Punishment." New York Times, October 2, 2010, www.nytimes.com.

"Social Media May Play a Role in the Rise in Teen Suicides, Study Suggests." CBS News, November 14, 2017, www.cbsnews.com.

"Social Media Use Increases Depression and Loneliness, Study Finds." University of Pennsylvania, November 8, 2018, www.sciencedaily.com.

Tanner, Lindsey. "Rise in Teen Suicide, Social Media Coincide; Is There Link?" Associated Press, November 14, 2017, www.apnews.com.

"You Want to Take This Online?" Time, August 01, 2005, www.time.com.

Zetter, Kim. "Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets 'Scary' Legal Precedent." Wired, May 15, 2008, www.wired.com.

Additional Sources

Additional information about cyberbullying can be found in the following sources:

Hinduja, Sameer, and Justin Patchin. Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2015.

Kowalski, Robin, and Susan Limber. Cyberbullying: Bullying in the Digital Age. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008.

Contact Information
Information on how to contact organizations that either are mentioned in the discussion of cyberbullying or can provide additional information on the subject is listed below:
Keywords
For further information about the ongoing debate over cyberbullying, search for the following words and terms in electronic databases and other publications:
Citation Information

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In September 2019, Channing Smith, a 16-year-old high school student from Manchester, Tennessee, killed himself. Days before his suicide, his classmates had outed him as bisexual by sharing sexually explicit text messages Smith had exchanged with a male classmate on social media.

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John Halligan shows the Web page devoted to his son, Ryan, at his home in Underhill, Vermont, Feb. 7, 2007. Ryan Patrick Halligan, bullied by classmates for months online, killed himself in 2003. States from Oregon to Rhode Island are considering crackdowns to curb or outlaw the behavior in which kids taunt or insult peers on social Web sites like MySpace or via instant messages. However, cyberbullying presents First Amendment issues because the statutes often criminalize speech and some of the language in certain laws and regulations arguably is overly broad or vague.(AP Photo/Toby Talbot, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Cyberbullying, sometimes called cyber-harassment, is bullying or harassing committed by electronic means.Cyberbullying has become a major issue in schools, as well as society at large, particularly after several high-profile incidents where kids who were bullied online committed suicide. The White House called a summit on the phenomenon in 2011.

More than 30 states have cyberbullying laws and other states have laws that require public school districts to amend their anti-bullying policies to include cyberbullying.

First Amendment challenges to cyberbullying laws

Cyberbullying presents First Amendment issues because the statutes often criminalize speech and some of the language in certain laws and regulations arguably is overly broad or vague.For example, the New York Court of Appeals invalidated Albany County's cyberbullying law as overbroad in People v. Marquan M.The defendant, a high school student, posted sexually explicit pictures of classmates on the Internet.

Prosecutors charged him with violating Albany County's law, which read:
"any act of communicating or causing a communication to be sent by mechanical or electronic means, including posting statements on the internet or through a computer or email network, disseminating embarrassing or sexually explicit photographs; disseminating private, personal, false or sexual information, or sending hate mail, with no legitimate private, personal, or public purpose, with the intent to harass, annoy, threaten, abuse, taunt, intimidate, torment, humiliate, or otherwise inflict significant emotional harm on another person."
The New York Court of Appeals reasoned that the law was too broad, because it "embraces a wide array of applications that prohibit types of protected speech far beyond the cyberbullying of children."

The North Carolina Supreme Court invalidated its state cyberbullying law in State v. Bishop (2016). This case also involved a high school student who posted negative comments about a classmate under a sexually explicit photo.The state law prohibited the use of a computer to "post or encourage others to post on the internet private, personal or sexual information pertaining to minors" with the intent to intimidate or torment a minor.

The state high court explained that the law failed to require that the subject of an online post suffer injury from the online tormenting and, thus, the law "sweeps far beyond the state's legitimate interest in protecting the psychological health of minors." The state court also noted the failure of the state legislature to define the key terms "intimidate" or "torment."Thus, the law could be applied to merely annoying speech protected by the First Amendment.

A related First Amendment cyberbullying issue involves school officials attempting to punish students for their cyberbullying speech that takes place entirely off-campus. Many state laws targeting cyberbullying apply whether or not the speech takes place on-campus or off-campus. In this photo, Sarah Ball, a victim of cyber bullying during her high school years, sits for a portrait at her home, Oct. 23, 2013, in Spring Hill, Florida. Ball, now a student at a nearby community college, maintains a Facebook site called "Hernando Unbreakable," an anti-bullying page and mentors local kids identified by the schools as victims of cyberbullying. (AP Photo/Brian Blanco, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Regulating student off-campus, online speech

A related issue involves school officials attempting to punish students for their cyberbullying speech that takes place entirely off-campus.Many state laws targeting cyberbullying apply whether or not the speech takes place on-campus or off-campus.

However, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in a couple of decisions that school officials lack the authority to discipline students purely for off-campus, online speech.In one of those decisions, Layshock v. Hermitage School District (3 Cir. 2011), the Third Circuit wrote that "it would be a dangerous and unseemly precedent to allow the state, in the guise of school authorities, to reach into a child's home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities."

However, most other circuits apply the familiar " substantial disruption" standard from Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969). Most courts have applied the Tinker's reasonable forecast of substantial disruption standard even to off-campus, online speech so long as there is a reasonable connection or nexus to school activities.

There is another part of the Tinker test that is often forgotten.In Tinker, the Court intimated that school officials could punish students if their speech invaded the rights of other students.Cyberbullying expert James C. Hanks explains in his book School Bullying: How Long Is the Arm of the Law that this part of the Tinker case could provide the legal justification for cyberbullying laws.

. is a law professor at Belmont who publishes widely on First Amendment topics. He is the author of a 12-lecture audio course on the First Amendment entitled Freedom of Speech: Understanding the First Amendment (Now You Know Media, 2018). He also is the author of many First Amendment books, including The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech (Thomson Reuters, 2012) and Freedom of Speech: Documents Decoded (ABC-CLIO, 2017). This article was originally published in 2009.​

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
John Halligan shows the Web page devoted to his son, Ryan, at his home in Underhill, Vermont, Feb. 7, 2007. Ryan Patrick Halligan, bullied by classmates for months online, killed himself in 2003. States from Oregon to Rhode Island are considering crackdowns to curb or outlaw the behavior in which kids taunt or insult peers on social Web sites like MySpace or via instant messages.