At our 2024 PVI Parent Conference, Rachael Wiltshire from Auckland Disability Law spoke about cyberbullying; what it is, what the law says, and how to respond. The Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) is a piece of legislation that defines and addresses cyberbullying in New Zealand.
Children who have physical, developmental, intellectual, emotional, and/or sensory disabilities, are at an increased risk of being cyberbullied. Factors such as physical vulnerability, social skill challenges, or intolerant environments may increase the risk.
Cyberbullying can take many forms. It might look like calling people names, cursing them, spreading lies about them, or other types of behaviour that can be construed as trying to hurt or bully them. There are seven typical ways online forms of bullying:
- Harassment: repeatedly sending offensive, rude, and insulting messages.
- Denigration: sharing information about another person that is fake, damaging and untrue with the purpose to ridicule them.
- Flaming: purposely using extreme and offensive language to cause reactions of distress in the victim.
- Impersonation: hacking into someone’s email or social networking account to use their online identity to post vicious or embarrassing material.
- Outing and Trickery: sharing personal information about another or tricking them into revealing secrets and forwarding it to others.
- Cyber Stalking: repeatedly sending messages that include threats of harm, harassment or intimidating messages. This may be illegal.
- Exclusion: intentionally leaving someone out of group messages, online apps, gaming sites and other online engagement.
The key three steps to addressing cyberbullying are STOP – BLOCK – and TELL:
- STOP
- Take a break
- Don’t do it back
- BLOCK
- Block the person so they can’t contact you again
- Save the evidence first (e.g., take screenshots)
- TELL
- Complain to the website where the harmful communication happened
- If that doesn’t solve the problem, contact NetSafe
- If it is serious, contact the police
Civil Complaints
In New Zealand, NetSafe deals with harmful digital communications that are not serious enough to warrant criminal prosecution.
Netsafe can:
- Investigate complaints
- Talk to the website where the message(s) appeared to try to resolve the issue
- Arrange mediation
- Get a court order
NetSafe can also handle complaints confidentially.
Civil Complaints: Court Orders
If NetSafe cannot resolve a complaint, you can seek an order in the District Court. You cannot go straight to the District Court – you must go through NetSafe first.
The Court can order someone to:
- Take down a post
- Stop engaging in the harmful conduct
- Not encourage anyone else to engage in harmful communications towards the affected individual
- Publish a correction
- Give a right of reply to the affected individual
- Publish an apology
The Court can also order that the identity of an anonymous communicator be released to the Court.
Netsafe contact details
Website: https://netsafe.org.nz/our-work/helpline-services/the-harmful-digital-communications-act (includes an online complaint form and a chatbot)
Phone: 0508 638 723 Text: Text ‘Netsafe’ to 4282
Auckland Disability Law contact details
Website: https://aucklanddisabilitylaw.org.nz/
Email: info@adl.org.nz Phone: 09 257 5140 Text: 027 457 5140
