CONCERNS ABOUT the safety of young people online have understandably deepened following the two recent tragic deaths, first of Leitrim teenager Ciara Pugsley and now of 13-year-old Erin Gallagher from Donegal, whose funeral took place yesterday. Both girls were reportedly the victims of online harassment and bullying in the weeks leading up to their deaths. Unsurprisingly, the spotlight has turned on to websites such as the ubiquitous Facebook and the less well-known ask.fmand questions have been raised about the apparent lack of accountability of these services in such circumstances. However, the path to effective regulation is not always clear.
Bullying is not new, and is certainly not just an online phenomenon. But cyberbullying poses new challenges for all those concerned with the safety of the young and vulnerable. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of schoolboys stranded without adults on a desert island quickly descend into murderous brutishness. The fear into which Golding’s novel taps so powerfully – civilisation as a thin veneer, which can easily peel away when societal restrictions are removed, especially from the young – informs many of the periodic scares which occasionally consume western societies due to some passing youth fad or fashion.
The online world is no fad, however. It represents a profound shift in the way in which people communicate with each other, for good and for ill. It can sometimes dehumanise, as is evident in the anonymous vitriol which is all too prevalent across the internet. But it can also liberate and educate. And, more often than not, it is children and young adults – the “digital natives” who have been born into this new world and know no other – who find themselves cast as pioneers at a vulnerable time of their lives.
For many parents and educators, the world of digital social networks is as remote and foreign as any desert island. At least the actions of young people in their schools, on the street and in the home are regulated by established custom, institutional rules and ultimately by the law. But online the law is ill-defined, the regulations are non-existent and society struggles to define acceptable codes of conduct.
Even the language we use to describe online interactions is debased and commodified by the profit-driven corporations which run them. The banalities of Facebook – all those thousands of half-hearted “likes” and so-called friends – are insufficient or even offensive when discussing the death of a child.
Minister of State Kathleen Lynch is surely right when she states in relation to cyberbullying that “we need to put very robust models into schools to teach children that their actions have consequences.” One might wonder why those robust models are not already in place, since young people have been using social media for more than a decade. It is disturbing that it appears to have taken such terrible tragedies to awaken us to the necessity to take serious action in offering education, information and also regulation in this area.