Speak Up–Kōrerotia19 April 2017Cyberbullying

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Nau mai haere mai, welcome to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”. I’m your host Sally Carlton and today we’re talking about cyberbullying. We have three guests: Sean Lyons, Director of Outreach from Netsafe – thanks Sean for joining us from Auckland on the phone.

Sean My pleasure.

Sally George Guild, who is a lecturer at Ara University or Ara Tertiary Service?

George Ara Institute.

Sally Sorry.

George Kia ora, no worries.

Sally Ara Institute next door which is pretty handy, you’re right next door which is cool. And Nikki Wheeler, who is one of the founding members of Sticks ‘n’ Stones a cyberbullying group. So I’m really looking forward to hearing a little bit more about the background of each of you and what you think you’ll be bringing to this conversation. Sean, perhaps we’ll start with you.

Sean Sure. So in terms of my background, I come from a background in both the IT industry and education. I was a teacher for a number of years, a high school teacher for a number of years. Obviously Netsafe… The one thing, I guess, when you speak to someone who has heard of Netsafe the first thing they’ll probably say is that “They’re the cyberbullying people” and it’s not to say we do any cyberbullying - hopefully we don’t - but in terms of that, that has been a great deal of Netsafe’s bread and butter and a big part of the reason that Netsafe existed so it’s certainly

something that we as an organisation are interested in, that I am personally interested in and I love talking about this kind of stuff and it’s great to hear other people’s opinions and points of view and really appreciate the chance to discuss it today.

Sally Sean, just something that struck me when you were talking then, you mentioned you were a teacher – is that one of the reasons that you got involved in this cyberbullying space or is that sort of a personal experience thing?

Sean It was and I wouldn’t want to overstate it too much in terms of the reason that I’m here but there were… Towards the end of my teaching career I was very much aware and directly involved in a number of incidents, often disciplinary incidents, in terms of what my roles were within schools that had increasingly cyber elements to them and that was both interesting and challenging at the time within a school environment when we were trying very hard to capture the enthusiasm that young people had for online technologies and think about ways in which we can harness that enthusiasm - which is very much the conversation that when on in education at the time, harnessing that enthusiasm and that natural desire to learn that we were seeing motivated by students as individuals outside of school - and saying how can we grab this and utilise it in terms of the more formal education but at the same time then wrestling with the increasing numbers of online-related discipline issues. But very much that became a big part of what I was doing in my role as an educator and so it became a logical extension to carry on doing that with an organisation like Netsafe.

Sally Interesting. I can see both our guests here nodding away. Nikki, how about we hear from you?

Nikki So basically my experience in cyberbullying started when I joined Sticks ‘n’ Stones which is a group of young people who are promoting positive life online and just trying to create a positive change in our community. We started down in Central Otago back in 2013 - back then I was just a member - and we were doing all these sorts of cool things to just create a bit of positivity. We just saw there was a need for a bit of change because there was such a negative culture online definitely in our community, being such a small community I think that possibly magnified the issue a little bit. Now I have moved to Christchurch - I’m studying to be a primary teacher at the University of Canterbury - I’ve sort of taken a step back from the group and I’ve become more of a mentor to the other members who are coming up through the ranks and I’m also a member… I’m a secretary on the Board of Trustees so that’s where I come in.

Sally And Sticks ‘n’ Stones has just won some award? Or you won the award?

Nikki Yes I just won… It’s called the Giving Back Award through the Ministry of Youth Development just for my work through Sticks ‘n’ Stones.

Sally Very cool, congratulations.

George Well done. I like the name.

Nikki It took us months and months to come up with the name, my goodness.

George Did it?

Nikki Yes that was one of our first big hurdles that we came over was trying to figure out the name and a logo and our brand and all that sort of thing.

George Never was a saying so wrong.

Nikki Isn’t that the truth?

Sally Particularly when we’re talking about cyberbullying.

Nikki Exactly.

Sally And George?

George Kia ora. So I’m a social worker with a ten year, approximate ten year background working with adolescents in the areas of mental health, youth justice and addictions and I guess during that time I saw loads of young people who were coming to our services due to stress because of incidents that had happened online and I guess we were seeing increasing incidents of this in cases of young people coming to us - bullying just not stopping. Back in my day it would stop at the school gate but it just doesn’t stop anymore. And so we saw a lot of that as well as sharing of quite telling pictures and videos of students as well being shared around, we saw these incidents as being increasingly common in my work.

And now I find myself teaching social work next door at Ara Institute - formerly CPIT - and I guess in terms of cyberbullying and the Harmful Digital Communications Act we had some connection with this material last year via two ways. The first way was that our Year Two Social Policy class looked at cyberbullying as a social issue and then we also looked at the different ways it can be addressed, and the Harmful Digital Communications Act was one of those ways. I also taught some young people through Canterbury Tertiary College at Ara and they were sort of 16-18 [years old] and they would come to Ara on a Thursday and Friday and one of the unit standards was about how a law goes through Parliament and we looked at the Harmful Digital Communications Act and the young people had quite a bit to say about the issue of cyberbullying.

Sally I bet. Well this might be a good point then to talk about what is that Harmful Digital Communications Act? When was it introduced and Sean, to talk about Netsafe and its role therein as well.

Sean Sure, well the Act, July 2015 I think was the passing into Parliament and some parts of it became active immediately around that but it’s been a long time in the making in the run up to that so we probably saw three or four years of the legal review process in the run up to it and then it’s processed through Parliament and the various lobbying backwards and forwards before it was passed in to become law. And it was a rocky road in terms of passage in, there were times where it looked like it maybe wouldn’t survive and then even last-minute dramatic crossing of the House (I think is the phrase) where political parties had said they would back it and then didn’t. So I mean maybe from my perspective - I’m probably building up the drama here - it was quite dramatic for us, I’m not so sure that it’s… It’s the first time I’ve watched Parliament TV that’s for certain!

But here we are now 2017, on from the Act. Once the Act was passed, Netsafe had to express an interest and then compete, if you like, for one of the parts of that law which was for the establishment of what’s defined in the law as an approved agency to take complaints under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. So we were… So we got that secured in the beginning of 2016 and by November 21, Netsafe opened its doors as the approved agency and we’ve been functioning in that role ever since.

Sally Do you have a sense of how many complaints you’ve been receiving in the few months since you’ve been doing this role?

Sean Yes. So we… A good estimate would be somewhere just short of 400 personal harm complaints per month. So just to give some context, Netsafe has been operating a helpline for various issues around online safety since about 2003 and those functions continue. Netsafe still is Netsafe and still addresses a whole range of online safety issues for anybody in New Zealand but the increase in the numbers specifically around personal harm are approximately in that mid-300s to 400 per month range so that’s quite a jump for us in terms of the number of conversations that we’re having about harm. It’s always been in around about 10% of the calls that we have taken but those percentages will now jump and skew partly because of the agency function that we have but also just partly because I think the fact that we now have legislation that says you don’t just have to accept it because it’s online, you don’t just have to put up with it, that there are… there have been legal lines drawn in the sand around what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour online. It now means that people have a yardstick to draw that against and if they feel like they have been harmed then they have somewhere to go to talk about that.

Sally Just quickly then, to finish off this section: What is cyberbullying and is there a difference, do we think, between how it’s been defined in the Act versus how people tend to perceive of it?

Sean Look from my perspective, absolutely. Even the fact that the Harmful

Digital Communications Bill is commonly referred to as the Cyberbullying Bill or the Cyberbullying Act kinds of talks to what people’s perception of these kind of events are about. So the premise of the Act is that nobody should have to put up with any harm online, that a single action that causes an individual serious emotional distress - we shouldn’t have to do that - and there should be… People should be able to seek redress of some description if they are harmed by content online.

So bullying as, I guess, probably we all understand it - or as the popular understanding of bullying - is probably much as we have always imagined it, much as we’ve always seen it portrayed in the media that is the idea that bullying is an action that goes on between two people, that it happens repeatedly, that there is harm to an individual and that there is some kind of power imbalance between the two individuals. So that talks to the classic Tom and Jerry kind of assault so you’ve got somebody who in theory is more powerful and they pick on somebody who is less powerful, that’s the idea of bullying effectively. Cyberbullying, then, is the online component of that but this Act is not necessarily looking for patterns of behaviour that indicate bullying, what it is looking for is to assess whether or not somebody, like I say, has been harmed and if they have been harmed then provide them with in the first instance some civil redress and if needs be redress through the Courts and, in particularly egregious situations, then criminal redress via the Police.

Nikki I just think that often when you hear cyberbullying’ people might think, “Oh that’s cyberbullying, that’s not.” But like Sean’s saying, it’s if it actually causes harm then it’s still important to address it, not necessarily put a label on what it actually is. That’s what I would say about that. Also I think it’s important to remember that cyberbullying doesn’t usually happen in isolation, there’s usually something else going on outside whether that’s verbal, emotional, physical bullying, it’s very uncommon to have cyberbullying happen in isolation.

Sean Absolutely.

Sally Ok well we’ll just finish off this part with Nikki you’re choice of song. Was there a reason why you picked it?

Nikki I went through a bit of a tough time during high school and this was sort of like the anthem to my life, just to pick me up when I was feeling a bit down.

Sally It sounds very appropriate for today then. OK so we’ve got ‘Fight Song’ by Rachel Platten.

MUSIC BY RACHEL PLATTEN – FIGHT SONGSally You’re listening to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” here on Plains FM 96.9. I’m

your host Sally Carlton and we’re talking Sean Lyons, George Guild and Nikki Wheeler about cyberbullying.

Sean, you ended up talking about the fact that Netsafe is receiving 400ish complaints a month around cyberbullying. Do we have a sense of the scope or the scale of the issue in New Zealand? Rather than just the complaints coming through Netsafe, are there any other stats being collected?

Sean There are a number of stats - and I’m sure Nikki may want to talk about the Sticks ‘n’ Stones surveys they’ve done over the years - but generically speaking we’ve seen a number of figures that put it somewhere roughly around one in five young people will experience cyberbullying in the previous 12 months, and also some research done by the Ministry of Justice suggest that the adult numbers there would be about one in ten. And those numbers kind of stack up against a number of other territories that we keep a watch on - so European countries, countries in the US, OECD numbers - that would put us pretty much in the same league as a number of those other countries. So we are fairly confident that those are indicative numbers for New Zealand.

Nikki I think it changes from region to region, though; like I know with the Sticks ‘n’ Stones we conducted a survey across the five secondary schools in the region and we found that one in three [students] had been bullied in some form but I think generally across the nation it’s about one in five.

Sally Did you gather any data as to why it might be different for certain schools?

Nikki Yes I just can’t remember it off the top of my head; I have it all on my laptop but yes… Sorry.

George I’ve also got some information - and we looked at this in our social policy class around the discourse around cyberbullying in that it’s often perceived as a young person’s problem but it happens to a lot of adults as well.

Sally Which I think is not really a) known about or b) discussed.

George No.

Nikki I think that when people think ‘cyberbullying’ they often go, “Oh that’s the teenagers because they’re all on their phones, they’re all on their laptops all the time” and there’s definitely that stigma around oh you’re a teenager, you’re exposed to cyberbullying or bullying in some form but I think it’s really important to remember that definitely even with adults I think if you get really fired up about something or if it’s really… you’re really emotionally charged by something, often the internet can be a good place to let that go because you can be anonymous or you just become this other person when you’re on the internet, it’s not like you’re saying it to someone’s face. So I think that’s where that sort of comes in.

Sean It’s also very difficult because of the word - not to jump on semantics - but because of the word ‘bullying’ and the connotations that everybody has or the perception that everybody has when it comes to bullying - it’s very hard for a grown adult, in theory, to say I am being bullied. We might call it a number of other things but the truth of it is, by the definition, there are… and we see quite a number of adults - in fact more adults than young people tend to report these kinds of behaviours to us - very loathe, like I say, to call it bullying. But when it comes down to it in terms of the degree of distress and often in terms of how determined the perpetrators are, this happens to an increasing number of adults and the harm can be quite significant.

Sally It’s really interesting, that idea of people coming forward. You’ve got to report it, don’t you, to classify it yourself as being harmed.

Nikki I think that it’s really hard to… If you’re admitting it to someone else you’re admitting it to yourself and you’re going, Yes this is actually hurting me. And it’s a hard thing to be able to speak up about especially if you’re feeling quite isolated and alone.

Like when there was the anonymous platform at high school Ask FM was a big deal, everyone knows about Ask FM. I don’t think it’s as big a deal as it used to be but people would often feel very alone and very isolated and think that because there was all these messages coming through it would be everyone thought the same thing when it would have just been one person. So I think that them going, “Hey” - asking for help from someone - would be really difficult because they’re like, “Oh what if you think the same?” So yes…

Sally As well as age - and we’ve spoken quite a lot around teenagers and adults - do we have any sense of whether people who are being bullied, or at least people who are reporting cyber bulling, if those stats can be broken down by other demographics? I’m thinking sex for example, ethnicity perhaps. Do you know if those sorts of breakdowns are recorded?

Sean To some extent we do record details where people choose to provide them. So obviously as an organisation we don’t… It’s not compulsory to report to us any of those demographic information or any of that demographic information associated with a report of harm but some people do and to be honest with you, the numbers probably aren’t… Because of the number that do versus don’t report are probably not statistically significant. But what we have seen over time, certainly in terms of gender, then there’s never been particularly any sway one way or the other.

Now, you can walk into a particular environment - in the past I’ve worked with girls schools who have felt that their problems were particularly great by comparison to co-ed or to boys schools - but the numbers don’t quite stack up. There have been… There is some evidence that there are

groups that may be more likely to suffer at the hands of cyberbullies but, like I say, probably not statistically significant enough to say it’s a problem for this group and it’s not a problem for that group. The truth is that, unfortunately from what we can see, those that are harmed by other people in online communications are fairly good representation of the general population. So it’s not like we can particularly say right well if we could just deal with a particular age and a particular ethnic background we’d be fine because the truth is it affects most people in whatever capacity we are… Sorry, not “most people” but “most types of people,” no matter who they are.

George I agree, I have some statistics here. There was a New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, I think undertaken last year, and it reported that females in the age bracket of 18 to 19 self-reported the highest amount of cyberbullying but I remember in social policy when we were looking at this, there was a clip on one of the morning news shows that actually reported that men also reported quite a high level of bullying and some of the content about what they were bullied about was a little bit different I think. There was a tendency for females sometimes to receive a higher content of sexualised bullying and the men’s bullying was about their identity, their masculinity or violence, threats of violence. And lots of work I did in London with young men in the youth offending arena had received all sorts of online bullying and threats of violence.

Sally Interesting, isn’t it, because that’s I guess… it’s talking about physical violence but through the medium of the internet.

Sean I think what that says - and it’s something that we’ve probably all known for a long time - is there’s not something entirely exceptional about cyberbullying but people don’t pick something new and do something quite separate in terms of cyberbullying and, like Nikki said before, the idea of isolated cyberbullying increasingly is being understood as nonsense. What we’re seeing is similar kind of social challenge that goes on physically that is being represented on communication mediums that young people and adults are using anyway. So when we’re talking about increasing amounts of cyberbullying what we’re probably really talking about is the increasing display of traditional harmful behaviours being displayed online rather than new behaviours taking place online.

Sally That’s really interesting to know. I also wonder if potentially people are more aware of it and more aware that there is an avenue of recourse potentially so that they’re maybe reporting it more. Is that what you were getting at, Sean?

Sean Partially, unfortunately there’s also a - I wonder how long it would take me to have a bash at the media but there we go, here I am - there’s an increasing penchant unfortunately for media outlets to sensationalise online harassment, to sensationalise cyberbullying and talk about it in isolation as you know a pariah that needs to be stamped out or dealt with which on one hand to some extent has led to the establishment of a new

law in New Zealand and I think eventually we’ll all be grateful for that but what it’s kind of skipped over is the opportunity to to widen that conversation around is this now just giving us a window into problematic behaviours amongst all sorts of people, not just young people but in terms of the way that we are dealing with each other and to the way that conflict is going on? But we’re seeing an increased report, we’re seeing an increased media coverage and that may well be giving us a slightly distorted view of what’s going on.

Sally Very probable. OK we’ll just end this segment with George’s choice of song which is ‘High and Dry’ by Radiohead. Any particular reason or you just love it?

George It’s my favourite song in the world but I was thinking it’s over 20 years old now and I guess I really loved listening to it when I was in my late teens which isn’t the easiest period of life so love this song, gives me great comfort.

MUSIC BY RADIOHEAD – HIGH AND DRYSally You’re listening to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” on Plains FM 96.9 and we’re

talking today about cyberbullying. We’ve just been talking about the incidences of cyberbullying in New Zealand and we thought we might get onto talking about what actually is it? What are some examples? George, you touched on before people being threatened physically, you also touched on sexualised representations - those sorts of things - but some kinds of case studies would, I think, be very helpful in terms of clarifying for our listeners exact what is cyberbullying… Because it’s kind of this big amorphous concept in many ways.

George Sure. I could give you a few case studies but one that comes to mind was a young person I was working with, in London actually and she was referred to the mental health service I was working with at the time because she wouldn’t go to school. And actually it emerged that someone had taken a video clip of her, some footage of her performing a sexual act without her knowledge, and then distributed that all around the borough, so the local area. So she didn’t want to go to schools in that area. She was quite happy to go to schools outside of it but the borough wouldn’t place her outside so that was one really clear case of cyberbullying and I used to walk around with her in the community and we had to change direction several times because she would know somebody who had seen it and it caused her a lot of embarrassment and she wasn’t able to go to school.

Nikki I’ll just talk quickly about my own experience of what happened and basically what I experienced was one girl who was just really awful to me on lots of different platforms. So it started off just text, like we were really good friends and then the relationship turned a bit nasty. So it started off with just text and then eventually it was messages on Facebook and then I was getting people sending me screenshots of messages she’d sent them just spreading awful things and I think… I don’t really know what

else to say about that but that’s just one of the things that was just on several different platforms that she was saying really awful things.

George Sorry Nikki, can I ask - because there was a case in Australia where at a school somebody posted something up on a class page, a Facebook group page and other people from the schools “liked” it - Did anyone else “like” it?

Nikki It was more… It was necessarily a post on Facebook it was just within the friend group so it sort of made me feel quite isolated and I think what happened with that was I never stopped going to school - I was really lucky I had the support of my parents and the school, I never stopped going to school - but when I went to school it was isolating because people had read the things and they were like, “Oh well we don’t want to be friends with her because we don’t want to be the victims ourselves.” So it’s sort of the full circle as well: so it’s online and then you get to school and people don’t want to associate themselves to you because they don’t want to become the victims themselves. So I think that’s again where the bystander comes in: it’s really important if you are seeing those behaviours happening to just jump in and offer some support because the more people you have to support you behind it the less likely they are to continue the act.

Sally I guess something that occurred to me listening to both your stories there is that cyberbullying can be about one-on-one - if it was just between you and this girl - but I guess maybe even the point of it is it becomes bigger than that and more and more people… The point is to embarrass or shame or….

Nikki And I don’t even think necessarily if it didn’t become bigger than that but because of the internet it can seem a lot bigger than it is.

Sean I definitely agree with that. One of the unique things, I guess, about cyberbullying as compared to what is often to referred to ‘traditional bullying’ is the idea of scale and scope and exactly as you say, you don’t have to see 145,000 “likes” to feel the pressure of that number of people in support of the perpetrator and turning their back on you. Often the fact that it’s there, it’s potentially visible, it’s been up already for X number of days before you were made aware of it, all of those kind of factors, even the perception of those things are part of the compound problem when this stuff is shared electronically as opposed to maybe just whispered behind your back or passed around on a piece of paper inside a classroom.

Nikki I think something really interesting about cyberbullying that’s always struck me is that you could be cyberbullied without necessarily having someone cyberbullying you. So say there’s an image shared or something like that - so it could be shared 147 times for example - the person who has passed it on keeps passing it on aren’t necessarily cyberbullying you it’s just a one-off incident but you are being

cyberbullied because it’s happened so many times. So I think that’s another side of cyberbullying. That’s just so difficult because cyberbullying is just this huge broad spectrum of what could… Anything that could happen.

Sally I think as well with, that you don’t have to know the person, the picture of that person - you don’t have to know them, you could still just share it and not actually target anyone deliberately but in sharing it you are nonetheless…

Nikki Or even “liking” something on Facebook, like you were talking about before, even if you’re “liking” it you’re not cyberbullying the person but they are being cyberbullied due to the effect that it’s having on them.

Sally Does that it make difficult, Sean, in terms of people’s complaints and how to actually get some redress for them?

Sean In terms of the numbers of people following or watching it?

Sally Yes.

Sean I suppose there’s… the idea effectively that the bystander component to any bullying situation is obviously hugely important, when you extend that online and I think to say that someone has positively liked something that was clearly and openly detrimental to an individual, you could say that someone who has joined in but when the bullying is or the messaging is subtle, when you take… Let’s say you take a meme where you put a picture up and you address an issue without naming somebody but everybody within a particular social circle understands that it’s actually pointed at a particular person, the image itself contains nothing that directly links to the person but let’s face it this is a network public amongst a small group, everybody knows who it’s pointed at. But then you say, Well you’ve all followed it, you’ve all liked it therefore you’re partly responsible and you then get in that situation where people could quite easily plausibly deny it and say well as far as I’m concerned it’s just an image, it doesn’t name anybody, I’m not really involved, I was just… So there are a whole lot of difficulties. But in saying that, the idea that people can be… and people will take great lengths to make themselves anonymous around that... Part of the need for us to have a legislation around this kind of thing is that some of that pseudo anonymity needs to be… Where there is clear and obvious intent to cause harm, that people’s attempt to hide who they are… that shouldn’t be a defence for them, we need to have the ability to say in certain circumstances this is not on, this person has done this, they’ve clearly harmed that individual so now we need to go about a process of working out who that was, actually who it was and taking some action against them as a producer of this content rather than just sort of guess work or trying to blame a group for the activity or one person.

Sally Something that interests me - and this is because it tends to come up in

not just cyberbullying but in media and other avenues as well - is the idea of what can you say and it still be freedom of speech, freedom of expression? Are there any lines laid out in the Act around as soon as it’s causing harm but then if it wasn’t deliberately causing harm but if someone takes offence to it - you can say something and it not necessarily deliberately be offensive but nonetheless can be or different people read things different ways. There’s a lot of subtlety I think in there. Anyway, just any thoughts on that would be interesting.

Sean In terms of the way that the Act is laid out, there are classic reasonable person tests within it, there are a number of communication principles that have to be breached in the first instance. So if somebody is deliberately creating false information, that they’re lying about somebody, are they encouraging other people to harm individuals? So there are certain types of communications that are harmful but then there is the test that says, is this person actually seriously emotionally distressed? Has this actually caused harm? So first of all, has it breached the communication principles, these kinds of rules of what is and isn’t OK?

But on top of that is there actual demonstrable harm here and that’s for the Court to decide, should those actions get that far, and then on top of that in terms of a Court ruling around these things and there are certain factors that can be taken into account which can be things like what is the age of the producer of the content and/or the target of the harmful communication? But also, despite the potential harm and despite maybe the breach of the principles, is it in the public interest for this to have been said despite those things? So there’s protection around humour and satire, there’s protection around the idea of whistle blowers, if you like. So if you’re a corrupt politician - and I use those because that’s an outlandish example because we all know in New Zealand we don’t have any of those - so if you are a corrupt politician and somebody exposes something that you’ve done you can’t use the Harmful Digital Communications Act as a lever to silence that individual who is exposing what you’ve done because it’s in the common good that a corrupt public official be exposed. It can’t be used to censor, people can’t decide that they don’t like what you’re saying because they have an opposing political view and then use this Act in theory as a lever to say, Well I’ll have your ability to talk freely closed down. And all actions under this Act have to take into account the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act so in theory there are protections around freedom of expression and those other things.

I think the thing to remember - the thing that sticks with me and I wish I could remember who first said it in the course of the work around this - was that freedom of expression is a right but it doesn’t trump all the other rights that an individual has. We have a right not to be harmed in our daily dealings both walking down the street and online so we can’t just wave a freedom of expression banner whilst we’re destroying people’s spirits and say. “Well look, freedom of speech, I’m allowed to say it.” We need to have some empathy but we also need to understand that we just

can’t go around saying everything we want just because we feel like saying it if we’re directing it at other people and if what we’re saying is likely to cause that person significant harm.

Sally Very well said. OK well just to finish off them this section we’ve got your choice of song, Sean, which was REM ‘Everybody Hurts’ in fact which is very appropriate.

Sean So the idea really is… It’s a song I like, it’s a song again that reminds me, like you said George, of just how old I actually am but the idea often and like we said before, the idea of the Cyberbullying Act, when people immediately think of a certain group of the population, these issues affect us all and also fixing these issues requires us all to have some empathy for everybody else around us so that’s why we picked this song.

MUSIC BY R.E.M – EVERYBODY HURTSSally You’re listening to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” and we’re talking about

cyberbullying. For this final segment we’re going to think about what can individuals do if they feel they’re being victimised or in the case of parents if they feel their children or people they’re looking after, teachers maybe, students are being cyberbullied. What might be some avenues of recourse that they could follow through with?

Nikki I’ll jump in here. I think that the most important thing to do if you are a victim or you feel like you are being cyberbullied or anything negative online - it doesn’t necessarily have to be as huge as cyberbullying could be even if it’s just a negative comment - just talk to someone about it, it’s really important just to share that emotional load. I think when you talk to someone about it, it’s really important because you’re saying how you feel and it may just… What is it they say? “A problem shared is a problem halved.” I just think that’s really important and that encompasses what it means to talk to someone when you are having an issue and then you can take the time to talk with that person and really formulate a plan about where you… what you want to do next, who you want to inform next so you’re not struggling under the weight of it all by yourself.

Sean I absolutely agree, I think too often, certainly here in Netsafe, we talk to people who have left things a long time, that have assumed it would go away and have watched it getting worse and worse. Certainly from a technological perspective the speed at which you can get help certainly around content specifically - so the speed at which you can get things removed or blocked or taken down from the platforms that they exist - the quicker, I guess, that acute feeling of harm disappears and the less likely you are to feel that kind of infinite spread. So I think certainly the faster you can talk to people but also so somebody else can give you some of that perspective where you may be feeling like things are snowballing, it might help to talk to people just to get a mental check as to where it’s actually at as opposed to where you perceive it’s at.

George I completely agree with Nikki and Sean about talking to someone about it

and there’s also a range of technological things you can do that I’m not 100% au fait with like blocking and stopping following, all those sorts of things and sometimes I guess stepping away from the device for a wee bit, turning it off for a bit which is a hard thing to say sometimes to young people but stepping away from that…and adults actually.

Nikki Yes I think that’s something that parents often… It can be hard for young people to talk to their parents about it because they’re scared that their parents will go, “Right I’m taking your phone, I’m taking your laptop, I’m taking this and that” because they think that that’ll make it go away, it doesn’t and it can make it worse, if anything, because you… I know that I think that if my phone or laptop got taken away I’d just keep running through different things in my head about what could they be saying about me now because sometimes it’s better to know than to not know. I’d prefer to see what people are saying about me than not see it. So I think that’s a really interesting debate about whether you should just turn your phone off for a bit or not. I think it’s different people.

George I think there’s the blocking of things and also I completely agree with you, I’ve worked with young people whose parents have taken their phones away and actually the social media phones and electronic devices are also a great source of support for young people as well.

Nikki Yes and it can be more isolating if you don’t have it than if you did have it and see the negative comments and have the positive like with your friend chat and something like that.

George Sure but I guess there’s overlooking at it as well. There was the horrific case of Charlotte Dawson in Australia who was being trolled and constantly looking… Like, she obviously had other issues and this was on top of those and constantly looking at those comments, there’s a point where yes you want to know what’s going on but there’s a point where it’s really unhelpful to keep looking at those.

Sally And how about in terms of advice for people just to stay safe online and hopefully avoid getting into this situation before it even starts. Are there techniques that you could recommend or is it just one of those things, the internet is so vast… See what you can do?

Sean I think that there are to some extent. So there’s the… I can’t believe I’m saying old adage of “Don’t poke the bear, don’t feed the trolls” but those kind of things are stuff that you can do to avoid that when you know or the point that you realise that somebody is there to argue with you then not pushing back, ending those conversations, doing that block/unfollow/flagging all of those kind of responses are useful. But the truth is for a lot of people, the worst situations are the ones where people who up until that point have been trusted confidants, have been friends, have been life partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives - it’s very hard to protect yourself against an attack from someone who has been as close to you up until that point. I think the best way to protect

yourself in those circumstances is understand what your rights are, understand what your options are, understand what those technological solutions are but also understand that when things get out of your ability to deal with them, either technologically or emotionally, that there are other places and other people that can provide that help and support. Now, they may well be people within your own existing networks - we know from research that the first place that most young people go when they experience these things are their friends, peers are the most important actor in successful resolution for young people who are being harassed online - but when those peers run out of ideas or if you can’t talk to those people about it because of the nature of the situation then finding other help services that can support you is also a vital avenue. And like I say, knowing… It’s all very well for us to say and you need to be able to block them but if it comes down to it and it takes you several days to work out how to do that blocking then the effect of it is minimised so making sure you’re familiar ahead of time.

Nikki Just one thing I’d like to say is just everyone who is online I think it’s really important if you’re posting something just reread how could it be taken, how could someone read that and what is the effect going to be and do you really want to say it? I think that’s the most important thing is just taking that first step to be positive online because the more people that are positive, the less people are going to want to go against the flow maybe and be negative, maybe.

George I was going to completely agree and prevention is almost the best case scenario, be really aware of the impact of what you’re about to do is going to have either on yourself in terms of maybe pictures or videos for the future or on someone else.

Sally Well that’s an excellent point to finish up and as always basically I feel like we end this show saying speak up, share your story if you feel it might help - which is after all why we are called “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia.” So I’d like to thank you all very much for coming in, sharing your valuable insights and such a variety of perspectives which is really cool when we come to have these sorts of discussions.

Nikki Thank you.

George Thank you.

Sally Kia ora.

Sean Thank you and our pleasure.