The former chief justice of the Family Court, Alistair Nicholson, says the law has failed to deal with the growing problem of cyber bullying.

The call comes after a landmark prosecution of cyber-bullying offences in the Melbourne Magistrates Court.

A 21-year-old man was yesterday sentenced to community service under Victoria’s stalking laws for sending sent threatening text messages to a 17-year-old boy who days later committed suicide.

The father of the 17-year-old, Ali Halkich, made an emotional plea for tough new laws following the sentencing.

“We set out to prove that our boy was just a beautiful, healthy child and fell in a dark moment that he couldn’t really understand and believed all the threats, if they were real or not,” Mr Halkich said.

“Unfortunately it only took that brief lapse of concentration and he is no longer here with us.”

Mr Nicholson, now the chair of the National Centre Against Bullying, which is convening a conference on bullying in Melbourne, says there needs to be more specific cyber-bullying laws.

“There is a very strong argument that it should be considered a specific offence,” he said.

“You need to have some firm framework in which people can operate and know what they can and can’t do.

“In the state system, you tend to get it in the stalking area and you may also with some of the sexually explicit communications get into breaches of pornography laws.

“[This leads] to children, quite young people, being placed on sexual offences registers when yet it is some stupid piece of adolescent behaviour that has nothing to do with the sort of behaviour that those registers are aimed at.”

Education Minister Julia Gillard has conceded Federal Government responses to school bullying are not working.

Addressing the cyber-bullying conference, Ms Gillard said one in four children were targets of bullying and in 50 per cent of cases the response by schools was ineffective.

She said there were several areas in need of attention.

“These include empowering students about how to become part of the solution to bullying, and also empowering teachers to help them respond to bullying behaviour, how to intervene when they witness bullying rather than just standing by, and how to report it,” Ms Gillard said.

On the rise

Child psychologist Andrew Fuller regularly sees the effects of cyber bullying on young victims at his private practice.

“It really is the same as somebody who has witnessed a really awful kind of event,” he said.

“They are agitated, they are fearful and they are not sure who is on their side and who’s not.”

He says there is a common belief among cyber bullies that they are legally immune.

Professor of child and adolescent health at Edith Cowan University, Donna Cross, has been researching cyber bullying for three years.

She says the number of children who report being cyber bullied has increased from 15 to 25 per cent over that time.

“About 10 per cent of young people tell us that they are cyber bullied,” Professor Cross said.

“But if we ask them have you ever had somebody send you a nasty picture or a nasty message over the internet or your mobile phone, up to 25 per cent of young people indicate that they have had this behaviour.”

Professor Cross says she believes the solution to cyber bullying will come from schools, but she says legislation is also important.

“Our laws are miles behind the behaviours that young people are engaged in so if people are relying on regulations or a regulatory environment to stop this behaviour, I think that it will be very ineffective in the short term,” she said.

Psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg also wants specific cyber-bullying laws, but in the meantime he says that children need to be taught good cyber citizenship.

“Many young people hide behind a keyboard and there is this phenomenon of digital Dutch courage, where kids will say and do things online that they’d never do in real life,” he said.

One of the key messages that will be delivered at the bullying summit is that educators need to better involve children and teenagers when developing policies to deal with the problem.