The first key element of a strategy would be prevention. So it would be public awareness. It would be all of those things that we see people currently beginning to do. It has to be coordinated, in that various levels of government have various jurisdictions over certain of the pieces that are needed to put this puzzle together. So it has to be pan-Canadian, pan-governmental, and there have to be NGOs and academics and schools, etc., that will move into this so that it isn't one jurisdiction only. But I'd like to see, first and foremost, public awareness of the problem and the danger that bullying as a whole carries with it, as well as the sort of grey area of cyberbullying.
Secondly, I'd like to see preventative programs move forward and become real, in society and within schools, etc., based on the jurisdiction under which it falls.
Thirdly, I would like to see us look at how we could deal with the victims of this kind of bullying, or of bullying of any kind. I'm going to think that the victims have a two-pronged hat. Many studies and psychologists and academics have found that in fact people who bully are themselves victims. In other words, they began to be bulliers because of a sense of powerlessness, because at some point in their life they were bullied, were made to feel small, made to feel inferior, made to feel that they were powerless. Bullying is about power, so they tried to take power over others whom they saw to be weaker than they were. We need to deal with that component of it.
Then, of course, there is the problem of victims who are prone to suicidal ideation or who are prone to harm as a result. So there would be civil areas that we would look at, as well as criminal areas. In any strategy, I'd like to see a way of enforcing the strategy and a way of prosecuting those who have crossed the line into criminal activity, and some sort of way of getting society to be rehabilitated with regard to understanding how we use tools of communication in a totally different way.