Cyber-Bullying in Alex’s

I’ve written before on the topic of online libel, so my interest was piqued by word of mass suspensions from private girls’ school Alexandra College for online bullying. There are two stories on the topic in today’s Independent (registration required, but bugmenot may be able to help you out in that regard). The bullying took the form of comments on the hateboard site, and the sheer venom has to be seen to be believed. Have teenage girls become more evil since I was in school? They’ve certainly become less literate, having swapped standard English for a bizarre hybrid of Valley Girl, txt Slang and Ross O’Carroll-Kelly speak.

The matter was brought to the attention of the principal and the suspensions seem to be the result of an owning-up by some of the guilty parties, so legal issues are unlikely to arise. In principle though, the site has the same status as ratemyteacher.com. Crude abuse is not defamatory, which covers much though not all of what I’ve seen on hateboard. However, there are also plenty of untrue allegations “of a type to lower a person in the the eyes of right-thinking persons”, and some of them mention the targets by name. If someone felt like suing (and given the demographic profile of Alexandra College, that’s not beyond the bounds of possibility) they might have a case. The culprits can be traced via their ISP’s, which can be done either voluntarily by the hosts of hateboard, or on foot of a court order. Of course, this is unlikely to happen, firstly because the school have dealt with the issue in a way that seems likely to satisfy aggrieved parties, and secondly because, to be cynical for a moment, there’s no money in suing schoolgirls.