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Sydney Morning Herald Op-Ed: New bill gives government teeth to tackle cyberbullying
Last year one in five young Australians aged eight to 17 faced cyberbullying, according to recent research led by the University of New South Wale's Social Policy Research Centre.
Nearly three quarters of Australian schools reported incidents of cyberbullying.
None of this is news to the many Australian families that have been touched by cyberbullying.
They already know what the research confirmed: cyberbullying can be very serious and its consequences can be more far-reaching than bullying in the schoolyard.
For one thing, with traditional bullying you know you are safe once you get home – whereas if you face a stream of abuse whenever you check your emails or go onto Facebook or another social media service, you can feel under threat everywhere.
Another way that cyberbullying is more serious: the humiliation is worse because you know lots of people can be watching online, so it feels much more visible and public.
Tragically, a number of young people have committed suicide in recent years after being cyberbullied.
Now the Abbott Government is doing something about it – with the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill 2014 introduced into the parliament this week.
The bill responds to community concern that, today, when a child is bullied online, it is too hard to get a response – and to get a large social media service to take down cyberbullying material.
The Coalition did detailed work on this issue while in opposition, culminating in The Coalition's Policy to Enance Online Safety for Children which we took to the 2013 election.
We promised to implement an effective complaints system, backed by legislation, to get cyberbullying material targeted at and harmful to an Australian child, down quickly from large social media services.
This is vitally important because, as the UNSW research found, most instances of cyberbullying occurred on social media.
The bill introduced this week will set up such a complaints system.
It has been drafted following extensive consultation with industry, representative bodies for parents and schools, and experts in child psychology and online behaviour.
The bill establishes the office of the Children's e-Safety Commissioner, to take a national leadership role in children's online safety initiatives across government.
A key role for the commissioner will be to receive complaints when a child is the victim of cyberbullying.
Today, it is all too common when such complaints are made – whether to the police or the social media service – that nothing happens.
Under the new system established by the bill, if you have a complaint, you will be asked to go first to the large social media service where the material was posted.
But if there is no response, you can then go to the commissioner.
Under the bill, the commissioner will have two sets of powers it can use in responding to a complaint.
First, the commissioner can issue a notice to a large social media service requiring it to remove the material.
Secondly, they can issue a notice to the person who posted the material requiring the person to remove the material, refrain from posting the material or apologise for posting the material.
The system set up by the bill is designed to encourage large social media services to work cooperatively with the commissioner under what is called 'tier 1'.
But if such a service repeatedly fails to respond to notices, it can be moved to 'tier 2' – and then it will be required by law to remove cyberbullying material, and face substantial fines if it does not.
This two-tier scheme offers light-touch regulation where a social media service has an effective complaints scheme – but it gives the government real teeth to require that cyberbullying material be removed in circumstances where a social media service is not doing the right thing.
The commissioner will help to get quick action on serious complaints – both by using its own powers and, where necessary, referring the matter to police, for example if there is an immediate threat to physical safety.
This will help Australian children – and their parents and teachers – as well as social media services and police.
Another priority for the Children's e-Safety Commissioner will educating children about online safety – with $7.5 million set aside in the May budget which will go to schools to give them greater access to online safety programmes.
The internet – and social media – offers a forum for human interaction which in the main is of great social benefit. But sometimes human interactions go wrong – offline or online.
When that happens, the internet – and social media in particular – can make bullying behaviours more dangerous to children who are the victim of it.
The measures in the new online safety bill will bring a better and more rapid response to these dangers – and help keep Australian children safer online.
