I'm going to go back to the data. What we hear typically when kids raise these kinds of issues is that they hate the term cyber-bullying. They felt that the term cyber-bullying has really done them a disservice. What they say is, “Call it what it is; it's violence. Call it what it is; it's misogyny and racism.” There's a range of responses, and their concern is that we tend to use a police response all across that range of behaviours.
I'm going to give you a very quick example. Two young women, 13 years of age, are best friends in Toronto. One goes on vacation for March break; one doesn't. They're back at school and they're texting each other and one of them says on a social media platform, “Ha, ha, I'm darker than you”, and they're both sent to the principal's office and accused of racist bullying because they're both Jamaican-Canadian and both happen to be black. They look at that and they say, “That is not cyber-bullying; that's stupid. That was my best friend who got a tan.” Often the school response is tied into bringing in the police officer who works at the school, blah, blah, blah.
They feel there's this whole range of behaviours, with uncivil discourse in the middle, and then serious risks or threats of violence and rape. On the one end they feel we overuse the criminal response, and on the other end they feel we underuse the criminal response. I teach criminal law and I still can't figure out why the police don't think that a rape threat is criminal harassment, because it sure looks like it to me.
It reminds me of years ago when we were trying to respond to domestic violence differently. One of the things we did was to work with police officers and say, “No, actually, you have to respond to that. Nobody gets a free bye with that.” I don't think we've used the tools we have in place very well, and I think we would make progress if we created initiatives that helped us talk with police in particular about how criminal harassment and uttering threats apply to the kinds of trolling comments we see in cyberspace.