Taking on Ask.fm

A father whose daughter took her own life after cyberbullying has pleaded for legislation to tackle the problem to no avail. We need to hit these sites where it hurts, he tells Claire O’Sullivan.

LAST October when I started researching a series on cyberbullying for the Irish Examiner, I had never heard of ask.fm.

It was a friend of mine with a 16-year-old daughter who told me to take a look, that this site took cyberbullying to a whole new level.

Normally when you’re researching something like this, you may have to spend 20 minutes surfing through pages of inane, teenage navel-gazing before you stumble across something irksome.

With Ask.fm, it happened within seconds. Page after page was crass, bullying, and intimidating. Kids as young as 14 were being accused of having threesomes, the world was being told they engaged in oral sex after a local GAA disco and then were being told they were fat, ugly, thick, and unpopular. They were told they were “dead”, “slappers”, “saddos”, “dogs”, and “whores”. I shut the website, feeling sick, dirty, and voyeuristic.

Since then, we’ve had the suicides of 15-year-old Ciara Pugsley in Co Leitrim and 13-year-old Erin Gallagher in Co Donegal. Both girls were receiving relentless abuse and vicious threats on the site. Then in Canada, 15-year-old Amanda Todd, from Vancouver, also killed herself following sustained torment online. And then in recent days, Hannah Smith from Lutterworth in Leicestershire was found dead in her bedroom by her 16-year-old sister.

Writing on Facebook last Friday, her father Dave Smith wrote: “Just to let all my friends know my youngest daughter took her own life last night.”

It doesn’t get much sadder than that.

When a particular commercial enterprise is being repeatedly cited as leading to teen suicide, questions need to be asked of that business.

On a Facebook page set up in memory of his daughter, Dave Smith asked people to sign an e-petition to introduce safeguarding measures on sites used by children.

The petition states: “Please sign if you would like the Government to step in and insist that Ask.fm and similar sites help us protect our young people. They are able to join from the age of 13 and can post anonymously.”

Ever since his daughter died, Jonathan Pugsley has railed against the anonymous nature of Ask.fm, warning that the anonymity settings handed a balaclava to criminals. He also appeared at an Oireachtas hearing on bullying this year warning that specific cyberbullying legislation needed to be introduced to act as a deterrent.

His pleas fell on deaf ears.

A report by the Oireachtas committee on transport and communications asserted that cyberbullying and suicide are not necessarily linked and should be treated separately.

It also stated that legislation is in place to deal with cyberbullying, namely under section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act, despite the country’s special rapporteur on child protection, Geoffrey Shannon, agreeing with Mr Pugsley that cyberbullying should be made a specific, criminal offence.

Geoffrey Shannon told the hearing he wondered if there was a reluctance to investigate by gardaí, or if the burden of proof in criminal cases was too high. His concerns also fell on deaf ears.

Effectively, the politicians washed their hands of the problem, pointing parents back towards teachers who have long argued, with good reason, that cyberbullying is not something that is confined to the school. The children might know one another from school, but the bullying takes place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when they’re outside of the responsibility of their teachers.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner yesterday, Jonathan Pugsley said he has got to the point where he has given up on politicians taking on Ask.fm. He repeated that the existing laws were a nonsense and until there is repercussions, the web will remain the Wild West.

“These sites were set up purely to make money,” he said.

“Money is all they care about. Not our children. If we want them to adopt some element of corporate responsibility, we need to hit them where it hurts. People need to stop advertising with them and I also see that Amazon, one of the biggest internet companies in the world, hosts this site.

“The big advertisers should threaten to boycott the site unless they remove the anonymity feature and put effective child protection policies in place. At least Twitter and Facebook attempt to have some kind of philosophy of corporate responsibility in place.

“Ask.fm won’t listen to parents or politicians but they will listen to advertisers as all they care about is money.”