Lawmaker raises alarm over rising incidence of 'cyber bullying'

MANILA, Philippines - A party-list lawmaker has raised alarm over the rising incidence of “cyber bullying” in schools, which are carried out through mobile phones and social networking sites on the Internet.

Buhay party-list Rep. Irwin Tieng, one of the authors of the Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act of 2009 or Republic Act 9995, said he had been approached on several occasions by parents reporting cases of cyber bullying.

RA 9995 aims to protect the rights of Filipinos to privacy by penalizing those who take photos or videos of sexual or similar indecent acts and showing them to the public using mobile phones or the Internet.

“After cyber voyeurism and video sex scandals, here comes another technology-generated form of abuse called cyber bullying which victimizes hapless children and teenagers in the country, especially in schools,” Tieng said.

He said he is now gathering data on cases of cyber bullying, which is now also prevalent in the US.

The US National Crime Prevention Council described cyber bullying as a situation wherein a child or teenager is repeatedly tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed 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 showed that cyber bullying also involves using and changing of passwords of victims; disclosure of personal data, posting rumors and gossip as well as embarrassing and humiliating photos and caricatures 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 came to us asking us to file a bill on the matter. We are studying the matter,” he said.

The Buhay party-list lawmaker has asked parents of children victimized by cyber bullies to come forward and report the matter to his office so that he would have additional input for possible legislation against cyber bullying.

“Initial reports reaching us showed there have been no cases of fatalities yet arising from cyber bullying, 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. – With Mike Frialde