Cyberbullying And The Malicious Communications Act 1988 In The United States

Government organisations have made a conscious effort to address the issue of cyberbullying, the fundamental change has been to attempt to implement new laws and policies to prevent this behaviour, and introduce punishments to deter suspects. Furthermore, in the absence of the implementation of a formal cyberbullying law, victims can only resort to certain other criminal laws to address related offenses; such as, harassment and cyber stalking. However, these do no not tackle the violation of cyber bullying itself but can offer comfort and assistance to victims nevertheless. One of the earlier examples of a policy practised is The Malicious Communications Act 1988 in the United Kingdom, which indicates that an individual is guilty of an offense, if they send threatening, indecent or offensive messages to another person using any medium, this includes through electronic communication but only when the objective is to induce anxiety or distress to the recipient (Bishop 2012). …show more content…
In addition to this, there have been numerous pursuits to criminalise the act of cyber bullying itself. For example, the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act (USA) 2009/2010, a new federal state law proposed in Missouri which aimed to implement criminal punishment of either a fine, prison time or both for perpetrators of cyber bullying (Meredith 2010). This was the result of a suicide case of a school girl named Megan Meier who committed suicide after enduring cyber bullying over a long period of time. However, this act was not passed due to the complexity for Internet users to be aware of all state laws and with the internet being a global platform, it would be too difficult to