After looking up so many sad stories about kids who have committed suicide or became depressed over cyberbullying it got me thinking. Are there laws or policies against cyerbullying?
One website categorized it in three categories Cyberbulling, Cyberstalking and Cyberharrassment. Cyberbullying and cyberharassment in this context were used interchangably, which makes sense. What does not make sense to me is that they have made laws pertaining to each different form. I looked into cyberbullying and the description of the law basically claimed that officials are monitoring kids at school and kids will be disciplined if they are caught cyberbullying someone on school grounds, and they claim to one day be able to monitor and punish kids off-campus as well. I am not sure how they will go about this, but I hope they do.
I then looked into Texas specifically and our laws against cyberbullying, this is where it got interesting. Scrolling down the page they listed all the states in America and listed their laws or policies against either cyberstalking, cyberbullying, or cyberharrassment, or any combination of the three. Once I got to Texas I noticed that we only have a law against cyberharrassment, which brings me back to the case of cyberbullying and cyberharrassment being interchangable. It makes sense through a definition stand point, but since these words are interchangable how can there be separate laws about them? I will definatley look more in depth about these separate laws later in my research.
http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=13495
That's interesting. I would have never thought that there would be laws against cyberbullying in the states. There are not laws against kids bullying others on the playground. It's curious to me that teachers/parents punish their students/children when they see them acting out against someone, but the law has to come into play when dealing with technological bullying. It shows how much is actually hidden from adults when kids do things online.
ReplyDeleteIts nice to see that you've researched the kinds of cyber harassment problems. The media have increased the media coverage of internet problems between youth and people of our generation. It was a problem before, and its definitely a larger problem now that people are more aware. The ease of accessibility has put people's security and privacy in jeopardy.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think that cyberbullying and cyberharrassment are different terms. One causes more damage than the other, and I think that one is more persistent and violent than the other.