Recently, the government enacted the “Online Safety of Children’s Act”. However, a recent article in the Women’s Weekly exposes how vulnerable even adults are to cyberbullying. Women, in particular, are vulnerable to harassment that is sexual in nature (revenge porn, malicious impersonation, sexual threats and more).

The article shares some excellent tips on online safety and we recommend that you go through them.

In this briefing, we share some further online safety tools that people can use. We also look at the legal tools available to people, if they are being harassed.

• Here are step-by-step instructions on how to secure your Gmail and Google+ accounts.
• Here are similar instructions on how to secure your Facebook account. In particular, we recommend the two-step authentication setting, discussed in the article, if you are using smart phones.

The legal position in Australia on cyberbullying is clear, as we discuss in this article: “The use of an internet connection to “menace, harass or cause offence” is a criminal offence under s.474.17 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code. It can be prosecuted by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, as can be seen here.”

So as the article suggests, if you are being cyberbullied, don’t suffer in silence. Talk about it and seek help. If it is serious in nature, discuss it with the Police.

You can read all our publications on cyberbullying here. We have also built external resources on the subject of cyberbullying, which you can access here.

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