Legal Remedies for Online Attacks: Young People’s Perspectives

Abstract

Online attacks can deeply affect young people and their reputations, sometimes with serious long-term consequences. There is growing awareness of the harms of both true and false attacks on others, especially where the attacks violate trust, confidence, and/or
expectations of privacy. There are, however, few reported Canadian examples of young people seeking legal remedies in response to
online attacks, which raises the question of whether young people understand the law as a meaningful response. This paper draws on the results of qualitative interviews with young people aged 15 to 22 about their experiences with and understandings of reputation,
privacy, and online attacks, with particular focus on their opinions and experiences regarding response to online attacks. In response to online abuse, young people focus on a range of goals, including minimizing damage, repairing and redressing harm, punishing perpetrators, and prevention. To achieve these goals, they look to a variety of sources of support or assistance, including themselves, members of their social groups, parents, the school (including teachers), social media platforms, police, and the justice system. Criminal and civil justice system responses are viewed as having limited effectiveness in responding to experiences of online abuse, and respondents view these alternatives as limited to the most serious cases of online aggression. We discuss the perspectives of interview participants in relation to current legal responses, and suggest that there may be a need to refocus policy attention away from traditional reactive civil and criminal law processes toward more proactive and informal response mechanisms.