Teenie-Prozess: Recht auf schlechtes Benehmen

Frank Patalong

Spiegel Online

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Cyberbullying

Web Article

Everyone interested.

1 - 20 pages

The article "Teenie-Prozess: Recht auf schlechtes Benehmen " by Frank Patalong published on 15.12.2009 on the website "Spiegel Online " deals with the growing problem of cyber bullying among young people and especially focuses on the ruling of a U.S. court which decided that this bad behavior on the Internet must be accepted to a certain extent. There had been a case in Los Angeles where the court agreed with a student who sued against the punishment she was given by her school because she had affronted a classmate via Youtube. Many people think that the disputes between young people are very rough in parts but that they normally come with the process of adolescence and that it is not ok to prohibit young people’s rights to freedom of expression and that especially sanctions imposed by schools are not appropriate. This raises the question as to how far schools have a right to intervene in cases of cyber bullying and what forms of punishment are appropriate in general. After all, the insults that are exchanged among students are actually those that are expressed daily on almost every school yard but with the difference that on the Internet, a more widespread audience is able to witness the defamations and insults. Especially after the case of the 13-year-old girl Megan who was driven to suicide by cyber bullying, the public was widely aware of this issue and people agreed that cyber bullying constitutes a criminal offense that must definitely be punished. Now the question arises in how far the treatment of cyber bullying as a crime can be justified at all.

We chose the article " Teenie-Prozess: Recht auf schlechtes Benehmen " by Frank Patalong published on 15.12.2009 on the website "Spiegel Online" because it presents a totally different view on the topic of cyber bullying. The article clarifies that there are also people who believe that cyber bullying is not a crime as insults and defamations among young people can be seen as normal to some extent; they can be found nearly every day on any schoolyard. But the difference between this “traditional” bullying and cyber bullying is that these insults are no longer restricted to the borders of the schoolyard but are made public and accessible to everyone. The central question in this context is if schools generally have a right to sanction in case of cyber bullying, since in its strict sense, it exceeds the school boundaries and does not have anything to do with the institution “school” itself. The other question dealt with is in how far cyber bullying can actually be regarded as a criminal offense.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,667121,00.html

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