Abuse case ruling ‘raised the bar’ for child protection

The ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in relation to child sex abuse survivor Louise O’Keeffe "raised the bar" for all child protection obligations placed on schools, a conference on cyberbullying heard yesterday.

Geoffrey Shannon, the special rapporteur on child protection, said it was not sufficient for a school to have an anti-bullying policy: That policy must be fully implemented.

In Ms O’Keeffe’s case, the European court had stated very clearly that the State had an obligation to protect children from degrading treatment and punishment and to take a proactive approach in this area.

Mr Shannon warned liability would be saddled on a school for failing to implement policies and strategies to eliminate bullying and cyberbullying, in particular.

He also believed there was a need for a review of existing legislation to ensure a comprehensive response to the growing scourge of cyberbullying.

Simon Milner, Facebook’s director of policy for the UK, Middle East and Africa, said the social network with a community of 1.3bn had an “absolutely zero tolerance” for hate speech, nudity, incitement to real world violence, bullying, and harassment.

But, he admitted, there was a difficulty in identifying harm and offence. He said most instances on Facebook relating to bullying started with a photo. It was the most often reported category from young people.

“Now what we do is allow people to resolve the issue between themselves,” he said.

Principal of Coláiste Daibhead in Carrigaline, Co Cork, Tadhg Ó Laighin, said principals should be able to directly access Facebook if they have a student in distress. He said it made more sense for principals to use the hotlines that had expertise across a range of services.

Clive Byrne of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPDP) who also addressed the conference, said banning the use of smartphones at school would only drive the cyberbullying issue underground.

“What we need to do is teach children how to use technology responsibly so they can benefit from the wonders that the technological revolution can bring to schools,” he said.

However, he felt that the social network Ask.fm was not doing enough to deal with complaints about cyberbullies.

Mr Byrne said principals found the network to be the most difficult to access when trying to get offensive posts taken down.

Ask.fm had been asked to address the conference but declined because of other business commitments.

While Facebook had made school management bodies and the NAPDP aware of the hotline numbers, Mr Byrne felt that the response times were far too long.

The cyberbullying conference was organised by Bully 4U and the Anti Bullying Centre at Dublin City University.