http://www.cybervictims.org by Dr.Debarati Halder
Recently I was delivering a plenary speech in the recently
held international conference on accompanying social networking sites in
teacher’s education arranged by the Loyola college of education, Chennai. Most
of the participants were either university students or aspiring teachers and 90% of whom felt
social networking sites were extremely harmful for children as well as women.
My presentation was on the darker side of internet. But I made it lot brighter
by presenting a model policy guideline as how schools can mould children in
this regard. My article on children of internet era, which I have uploaded in a
few web platforms including Academica.edu thus provides an understanding as how hate speech including cyber bullying and
other cyber atrocities are picked up by children, or rather instilled in them,
which may later make them hardcore bullies, trolls or agents of terror. Fortunate
are we that our children who may be picking up these traits or are falling
victims of such dangerous activities of other children, or their parents or the
schools can look for help from us who are researching on the subjects and those
of us who getting aware of the issue by such discussions. In our generation
when we were growing up, not many of our parents or teachers or schools did not
have such vast opportunities to learn about the trends and issues of deviant behaviours
of children which would make them hardcore bullies or terror agents. Resultant,
we have people who hurl hate speech, harassing speech, insulting remarks,
offending comments thinking that this is the way to win over people even if
their ultimate demands are devastating for the world. I say this because just a few days before my
plenary session at Chennai blogger Avijit Roy was brutally assassinated in Bangladesh
and some days after the same pattern followed for Washiqur Rahman, another
secular blogger. Both were attacked for their revolutionary thoughts published
through their blogs and other online publishing portals.
My concern is not particularly for what they wrote or how
they wrote or what invited the terror organisations to kill them; my concern is
how the threat was created to make them stronger on their views. As I get to
know from numerous media reports, both of them had received warnings from the
terror organisations that killed them. Avijit’s case especially attracts my
attention as it can be seen that he would have received threat mails, hate
mails, posts, messages etc against his views. How the world now should take
such hate messages that are posted/sent/written targeting the potential
victims? Since I received a copy of Professor Daniele Citron’s book Hate crimes
in Cyber space for a book review, I read
the chapters, the case studies and the legal interpretations of the writer as
well as other judges, police officers, lawyers who may have dealt with such cases repeatedly.
It is an unfortunate truth that the receivers of such hate messages may
consider these as typical challenges which motivate them to proceed further in
their aim. In cases like the bloggers’ murders, these threats messages could
have been and should have been reported to the police and if reported, then the
police should have taken enough precautions to save the lives. But in both the
cases, terror groups won.
World mourned their death.
Consider what happens when some one receives threat
messages, hate messages, insulting messages, and defamatory notes due to
interpersonal problems. Most of the cases when such messages are received from known
acquaintances or the potential interpersonal stalkers or ex partners, the
victim is advised to shun off the harasser, avoid answering calls and ignore
the messages. But it does not mean that the victim is encouraged to speak about
such messages in public or speak derogatorily about the harasser in public. By saying ‘avoid’, the victim is advised to
close doors to the perpetrator: it is like do not talk to him, do not entertain
his messages and do not talk about him. In my recently published book chapter
titled “Irrational coping theory and positive criminology: a framework toprotect victims of cyber crime” (co-authored with Dr.K.Jaishankar, published in
the book “Positive Criminology”, edited by Natty Ronnel Dana Segav by Routledge),
where I spoke about my theory on irrational coping mechanism in relation to
online harassments, I discussed in detail about this sort of positive coping
mechanism. The second step is obviously to report the matter to the police. The
law and the legal interpretations in the US and also in India speak about
reasonable threat test. Unfortunately, in 90% of the cases, police do not
entertain such reports. Reasons are numerous in number. It is not only from my
own personal experience in the Indian context; those who are researching or
practically dealing with online harassment cases from across the globe would
agree with me. But why does this
situation stay? especially in India? In almost all of my scholarly articles and
research reports I have emphasized the fact of reluctance of the victims in
reporting crimes and reluctance in reporting such messages at the first
instance is no exception. The bloggers’ death revealed to me the need of
understanding offensive messages again and from a new light.
Do not keep quite when you receive such messages. Do not
ignore the message. Take it as a challenge, but not the way to give the
harasser more chances to stop you forever. Share the ‘fear’, not in the fashion
that you would create a cycle of hate for hate, but through proper mechanism. Teach
your children to be rational by being rational.
Please Note: Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations
provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article, please
cite it as “Halder D. (2015), Hate
messages: do we really need to be concerned?
April 7,2015 published in
