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Illinois OKs expulsion for online threats

January 3, 2012 by

Students who make online threats can be suspended or expelled under a new Illinois state law, reports the Chicago Sun-Times.

While examples of abusive behavior by students have multiplied across the nation and studies suggest half of all teens have been victimized by cyber-bullies, the law’s impetus came from an incident at Oswego High School six years ago, Illinois House minority leader Tom Cross said.

When an Oswego student posted an online diatribe against his teachers in 2005, vowing “I’m so angry I could kill,” leaders at School District 308 weren’t sure what they could do, SD 308 spokeswoman Kristine Liptrot said.

Since the threat was made outside school hours, away from school grounds from a private computer, they were concerned about interfering with the boy’s First Amendment rights and felt unable to suspend or expel the boy . . .

“I don’t think kids are getting any meaner,” Cross  said.  ”Thirty years ago, a bully might have said something in class — now they’ll say it on the Internet.”

Filed Under: Education, Violence Tagged With: , , , ,

New crime: Insulting a minor

April 9, 2010 by

In response to the suicide of a 17-year-old girl who’d been taunted on social networking sites, a New York county would make it a crime to repeatedly insult a minor, writes lawblogger Eugene Volokh. Bad idea.

Under Suffolk County Resolution No. 1390–2010, cyber-bullying includes: “taunting; threatening; intimidating; insulting; tormenting; humiliating; disseminating embarrassing or sexually explicit photographs, either actual or modified, of a minor; disseminating the private, personal or sexual information, either factual or false, of a minor; or sending hate mail….”

Volokh, a UCLA law professor, comes up with some examples:

1. You post several items on your Web site about how some juvenile criminal is an awful person. You’re guilty of “repeatedly committing acts of abusive behavior” — namely, “insulting” ” — “against a minor” by “posting statements on the internet.”

2. A 17-year-old finds that her 17-year-old boyfriend is cheating on her. She sends him two e-mails calling him a “lying, cheating scum.” She’s guilty of repeatedly “insulting” the other person, and perhaps “sending hate mail.”

3. A 17-year-old e-mails her friend several times about her having had sex with a 17-year-old boy. She is guilty of “disseminating the private … sexual information” (even though “factual”) “of a minor” — the fact that the boy had had sex with her.

The suicide of Alexis Pilkington doesn’t justify “turning a wide range of normal — and, in some instances, constitutionally protected — behavior into a crime,” argues Volokh. The law must be written much more precisely and narrowly.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , ,