Cyberbullying taskforce admits they don't know if it is getting worse

One of the anti-cyberbullying taskforce's 29 recommendations in September 2018 was for the Queensland government to fund research into trying to establish a baseline bullying figure.

The Queensland government allocated $3.5 million over the next two years, aiming to announce “by February 2019” a group of people to put the recommendations in place.

Queensland Anti-Cyberbullying Taskforce member Kevin Bates, from the Queensland Teachers Union, said knowing how many young people were cyber bullied was a crucial education issue.

“There are no measures of cyber bullying to tell whether cyberbullying is going up or going down,” Mr Bates said.

“There is no clear picture of how prevalent this is at all, even though it is clear in some instances it can have a very high impact.

“What we tend to see is the very pointed-edge issues where bullying gets a mention, sadly in some suicide cases.

“But we don’t have a broader picture of how many young people are bullied.”

Twelve months ago, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk set up the taskforce, chaired by Brisbane Times columnist Madonna King, to investigate ways to tackle cyberbullying in schools.

In her introduction to the subsequent September 2018 taskforce report to Ms Palaszczuk, King referred to 25 per cent of children experiencing cyberbullying over the previous 12 months.

The report itself notes that no records of the number of cyberbullying offences are kept by education or justice authorities and recommends detailed research.

“The taskforce learned there is no data collected on charges, prosecutions and outcomes for stalking or harassment that relate to cyberbullying under the Criminal Code.

“The taskforce believes such information might help provide an accurate picture of the prevalence of cyberbullying, and the Queensland government should investigate collection and reporting of this data.”

King said one problem was cyberbullying was rarely reported by students.

"I spoke with hundreds of kids during the process personally and I asked them what was their response when they saw someone being bullied.

"And their response was, 'We don't report it'."

She said the cyberbullying taskforce – disbanded while the implementation committee is chosen and named – was determined to be "evidence based".

"We know how big [a problem it is], how serious it is, the age of the perpetrators, the age of the victims, whether it is in a specific area," she said.

"We need to understand this to inform the response the implementation committee can focus on."

King said students feared reprisals from bullies.

"They say 'snitches get stitches'. Now that is something, I have not heard that comment for 30 years but it is alive and well in the schoolyard," she said.

"So if kids are not reporting it and victims of bullying are not reporting it for fear of reprisal, it is difficult to get specific figures."

King said even police could not provide evidence of how many serious cases of cyberbullying they were investigating.

"Because if it's very serious it could be an 'assault', or 'stalking'," she said.

"It falls under several different categories."

The report also recommends the Queensland government’s scientific research body Advance Queensland investigate ways to “develop algorithms” to detect cyber bullying.

King’s September 2018 taskforce report identifies Facebook had developed algorithms that had stopped:

Recommendation 23 of the September 2018 taskforce asks that Advance Queensland, with other agencies, “support the development of applications and machine-learning algorithms to detect cyberbullying”.

Mr Bates said the percentage of how many children were actually bullied was important to judge where to direct policy changes.

“For example, in 2019 we might discover that 15 per cent of young people reported that they were cyberbullied,” he said.

“Next year, it might have gone up to 20 per cent and we are going in the wrong direction and we need to change tack."

Education Minister Grace Grace said $2 million was set aside to roll out community education campaigns.

Programs were being put in place in schools to record instances of bullying, she said.

“Significant progress has been made towards implementing these recommendations, including explicit reporting and response flow charts for addressing bullying complaints,” Ms Grace said.

Specialist Bullying Response Teams – recommendation 18 of the 2018 taskforce – remained in place, Ms Grace said.

She said the first report from the yet-to-named anti-cyberbullying taskforce was due in April 2019.

Other anti-cyberbullying recommendations are that schools have the responsibility themselves to monitor mobile phones and that social media organisations are asked to set default privacy settings to maximum standards.