Soaring cases of ‘cyberbullying’ of children in schools alarm author of ‘anti-cyberboso law’

Buhay Party-List Rep. Irwin Tieng, one of principal authors of the “anti-cyberboso law,” has expressed alarm over the rising incidence of “cyberbullying” whereby children in schools all over the country are being harassed by their peers using mobile phones, social networking sites and other means in the Internet.

“After cyber voyeurism and video sex scandals, here comes another technology-generated form of abuse called cyberbullying which victimizes hapless children and teenagers in the country, especially in schools,” said Tieng who was recently approached by a number of parents to report about the rise of cyberbullying.

Tieng said he is now gathering data on cases of cyberbullying which is now also prevalent in the US where the US National Crime Prevention Council described it as a situation when a child or teen is repeatedly tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child or teenager using text messaging, email, instant messaging or any other type of digital technology.

As in the US, the abuses are coursed through chat rooms, social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster, Multiply and My Space; personal web pages or blogs and micro-blogging sites such as Plurk and Twitter.

Reports reaching Tieng said local victims of cyberbullying experienced name-calling; using and changing of password belonging to their victims; disclosing personal data; posting rumors and gossips, and posting of embarrassing and humiliating photos and caricatures to make fun of the children targeted for bullying.

“We are collating these reports but we cannot identify the parents because most of the victims are minors. Some parents want to take legal action but they fear that there may be no legal help for them because of the lack of definite law on the matter so they come to us asking us to file a bill on the matter. We are studying the matter,” Tieng said.

The two-termer Buhay party-list solon has asked other parents victimized by cyberbullying to come forward and report the matter to his office so that they may include such cases in their case study preparatory to the filing of a bill if they shall have found substantial basis to do so.

“Initial reports reaching us showed there have been no cases of fatalities yet arising from cyberbullying, with most of the parents we talked to opting to transfer their children to other schools. But we want to seriously look into the matter before things get deadly serious,” Tieng said, adding that in the US, the problem has already resulted in several children committing suicide.

Tieng was one of the main authors of the recently enacted “Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act of 2009” or “Republic Act No. 9995” which seeks to protect the rights of Filipinos to privacy by penalizing those who take photos and videos of sexual or similar indecent acts which are posted or shown in video discs, the Internet and other communication devices. –Charlie V. Manalo, Daily Tribune