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.
Porn linked to sexual harassment in schools
Melbourne, May 21 (ANI): Schools are facing an ever-growing problem of sexual harassment among students and teachers, and it has partly been blamed on the easy access children have to pornography on the Internet.
Education and parenting experts are being approached by high schools to deal with the behaviour, which includes sex-based taunts, explicit text messages and even physical assault.
Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research figures show that 68 sexual assaults and 265 indecent assaults or other sexual offences occurred on school grounds in the year September 2009.
Dannielle Miller from Enlighten Education, who works with adolescent girls, said sexual harassment in schools was on the rise but many had not grasped the seriousness of it.
“We are on the brink of a disturbing new reality here – boys are being exposed to a pornification of our culture in music, on TV, in films and on the net,” the Daily Telegraph quoted Miller as saying.
In one of the worst incidents, a Year 9 girl stood up in class to get a textbook when a boy lifted up her skirt and started taunting her.
“She began crying but managed to compose herself and sit down and another boy reached into her blouse to try to rip her bra off,” Miller revealed.
“The school”s response was to give the boys detention. Given the same school gives detention for failing to do homework, this was an offensively weak punishment.
“The boys received no counselling on why what they had done was wrong,” she said.
It was only when the girl”s incensed father complained that a criminal offence had been committed that the school suspended the boys and called in their parents. The victim eventually received an apology.
Miller said one school told her boys” sexual comments and attitudes towards female teachers had become so problematic that they needed to take action.
“They asked me for ways to help their female staff become more resilient to sex-based harassment. Plenty of schools don”t have policies to deal with this,” she said. (ANI)