“We are falling behind”, legislators urge the creation of public policies against cyberbullying in Latin America

The proliferation of harassment and violence in the networks, especially among the youngest, demonstrates the need to create a legal framework combined with public policies in Latin America, aimed at preventing and educating about this phenomenon, legislators and experts agreed on Monday.

“It is something that has to have a much faster reaction. It is a phenomenon that is growing rapidly and the authorities are becoming slow, we are barely understanding the phenomenon,” acknowledged Mexican Senator Raúl Elenes Angulo.

The Mexican legislator warned about how this scourge especially affects boys, girls, adolescents and women in a Forum on cyberbullying, organized by the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, a think tank headquartered in the US capital, Washington.

According to the legislator, the “exclusively punitive vision has not had all the expected success” and stressed that this has to be a “problem of global interest”, where society also participates.

The example of Mexico is crucial to understand how the phenomenon of online harassment and violence behaves. According data According to recent reports from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) of that country, 9.7 million women and 8 million men were victims of some form of cyberbullying in 2021.

The groups between 12 and 19 years and between 20 and 29 years were the most affected among the females. Among the forms of harassment and violence, contact through false identities (36.7%), offensive messages (32.9%), sexual insinuations or proposals (32.3%), receiving sexual content (32, 1%) and ​provocations seeking a negative reaction (19%).

In 59.4% of cyberbullying situations experienced by both men and women, the harassers were not identified.

Among the strategies that can be put into practice is requiring the registration of identities when accessing a platform, as a way of rendering accounts and responsibilities so that the presence on-line stop being anonymous, reflected Senator Elenes Angulo.

When digital identity is everything

“Adults are migrants in the world of social networks, we are not natives and for us they are a very valuable and necessary communication tool that has brought us enormous benefits in the everyday world, but for girls, boys and adolescents , they are not just a tool, they are active in this digital world and there is their world, there is their self-esteem, there is a large part of their happiness, but also their anguish and destruction”, emphasized the Mexican senator Josefina Vázquez Speck.

Vázquez Mota, who chairs the Commission on the Rights of Children and Adolescents in the Mexican Congress, called during the forum to protect the youngest, who often “have no voice” in the world of adults

“Millions of girls and boys enter the world of networks and we adults are not teaching them anything about what is happening there,” said the senator, who gave examples of how the cyberbullying -or cyberbullying- can lead to suicide and cause trauma.

Elvia Mora Arellano, also a Mexican senator, agreed that adults should stop looking at the networks with an “essentialist gaze” and understand that there is a “digital identity” that is often everything for children and adolescents who live in a world eminently digital, much more so after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We think that children and adolescents are like us and are capable of taking care of themselves in an environment where we consider that the virtual does not hit us, it does nothing, but the virtual kills, the virtual is poorly cared for and leads us to tremendously terrible situations” , indicated Mora Arellano in reference to daily violence, generally oriented to sexuality and physical appearance.

A victim herself of what she describes as “fatphobia” and “pigmentophobia”, she argues that “fortunately” she had adults who taught her to understand that a human being is “much more than their physical appearance”.

“We know that we are integrating technology, but we are falling behind. (…) We have to do something. The most important challenge is to be able to find methods and forms of deterrence and prevention in terms of education for our boys and girls”, said.

Invest in training

Countries in the region such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela have approved regulatory frameworks dedicated to the non-transmission of private images and against the so-called revengepornhowever, a more comprehensive approach is needed, qualified the expert in gender violence, Luz Patricia Mejía.

Mejía, who works as technical secretary of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Convention of Belém do Pará of the Organization of American States (OAS), explained that the “obligation to sanction must be accompanied by the obligation to protect, which has to do with an entire legal and judicial system but also public policy that attends to victims of violence “.

“It is useless to penalize a behavior if there are a number of officials who have to implement and classify it and do not master the vocabulary, who do not know what it is sexting, catfishingand they don’t understand the situations that they should typify,” he added.

According to Mejía, there are studies on the subject in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile, although most agree that not enough data have been gathered to offer conclusions. “The violence on-line It’s the continuation of violence in the real world.”

For the official it is very “necessary to invest, not only in prevention, but also to invest in training, understanding what we are talking about”, for which it is urgent to allocate budgets and facilitate mechanisms. “There are very few public policies,” she declared.

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