Digital abuse of children is an increasingly serious problem, which is much more difficult to detect than physical violence, but is also less often sanctioned.
According to research, victims of cyberbullying are twice as susceptible to self-injurious behavior.
Last week, the region was shaken by the news of the suicide of a twenty-two-year-old man from Laktaš near Banja Luka. A young man took his own life after a video recording, made secretly, before a job interview at a gas station, was published and shared on social networks. Media in the region announced that the young man reported internet violence to the police, while after his death an initiative was launched to tighten legal sanctions in the area of threats to internet security.
Associate in teaching at the Faculty of Law of the University of Montenegro (UCG), dr Andreja Mihailović for "Vijesti" she assessed that there are more and more criminal acts in the virtual world, which, however, are difficult to process.
"Under the veil of anonymity, there has been an escalation of digital violence with often tragic consequences, which is confirmed by the recent suicide case of a young man whose business interview was recorded and publicly broadcast without authorization. According to the published information, the creators of the disputed content were released after being apprehended, and they are charged with the crime of unauthorized recording.
The tragic consequences have alerted the region to the seriousness of the consequences and the scale of the phenomenon of digital violence, justifiably calling into question the adequacy of the existing criminal-legal protection mechanisms," she pointed out.
Private lawsuits and hard proof
Mihailović reminded that the Constitution of Montenegro guarantees the protection of fundamental human rights to the inviolability of physical and mental integrity, privacy and other personal rights, and the Criminal Code of Montenegro incriminates their violation through the criminal acts of unauthorized wiretapping and recording (Article 173) and unauthorized publication and display other people's writings, portraits and recordings (Art. 175).
"For the existence of criminal liability, there must be intent on the part of the perpetrator and 'sensible encroachment on the personal life' of the passive subject, which the court assesses in each specific case, taking into account a number of circumstances related to the place and time of execution, the position in which the person is filmed... "These are crimes that are rarely prosecuted for two preventive reasons - the difficulty in gathering evidence and the fact that criminal prosecution is not undertaken ex officio, but only based on a private claim by the injured party," Mihailović said.
In this way, she claims, legal protection exists, but the competent authorities cannot activate it on their own initiative, but it is necessary to engage the injured parties, who rarely reach out for it due to powerlessness, fear of the perpetrator, public condemnation of the community and the desire to avoid the legal calvary.
"What further intensifies the scale of the consequences is the victimological nature, bearing in mind that the victims of cyber abuse regularly belong to the most vulnerable categories - children and youth up to 25 years of age. Therefore, it is a group that is hypersensitive to public criticism, especially in connection with the exaggerated perception of the importance of image on social networks", she emphasized.
The Internet is an unregulated space
The United Nations recognized digital violence (cyber abuse, cyber aggression) as a "serious manifestation of online violence" with elements of power imbalance, use of electronic or digital means, anonymity and the possibility to reach a wide audience, Mihailović reminded.
She pointed out that digital violence can be committed in a single act without the need to repeat it over time, since the distributed content can be republished and shared forming a temporal continuity and exponentially increasing the breadth of the audience.
"The Internet is eroding historical socio-economic barriers to communication, providing easy access to potential victims. In this way, the transparency and polyvalence of the virtual space makes the geographical and temporal scope of digital violence unlimited, while the existing preventive mechanisms are significantly limited. The reasons are numerous: the entire arsenal of open communication channels, the lack of capacity to detect perpetrators, imprecise regulations, tepid criminal policy and tacit confirmation through the absence of social rebuke," she said.
She reminded that digital violence can be carried out through the entire spectrum of communication platforms, from text and multimedia messages to social networks (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc.).
She pointed out that numerous studies have registered that the internet space has a highly stimulating effect on the temperament of abusers, since the veil of anonymity encourages even those who are unlikely to commit abuse in real interaction.
"Despite the numerous efforts of key actors on the national and international level, the Internet is still a largely unregulated space, and it is already evident that finding ways to raise preventive and protective mechanisms in the fight against digital violence cannot be solved in the short term," she said. Mihailović.
Teenagers are most often abused on the networks
"The statistics are devastating. In the last decade, there has been a worrying increase in the suicide rate among teenagers, and the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has declared suicide as the second leading cause of death among the population aged 10 to 34, which has focused the attention of researchers on the causal connection with the rapid expansion of digital violence," Mihailović emphasized.
She said that research by Swansea University, in collaboration with the universities of Oxford and Birmingham, conducted on a sample of 150.000 children and youth from 30 countries, indicated that victims of digital violence are twice as susceptible to suicidal and self-harming behavior.
"A pronounced problem with digital child abuse is that cyber abuse is much more difficult for parents to notice, since physical consequences such as bruises and scratches are easy to register, unlike digital records that remain hidden on the phone and personal computer," she said.
Mihailović said that according to the report of the European Parliament, children between the ages of nine and 10 are most often subjected to abuse on gaming platforms, and teenagers between the ages of 13 and 16 usually experience violence on social networks.
"A particular reason for concern is that reputation on social networks today represents an important developmental moment in defining the identity of children and youth who are unable to distinguish between acceptance and a sense of personal worth. For this reason, victimologically speaking, victims of digital violence face a whole range of devastating consequences for their emotional well-being and psychological integrity: from feelings of inferiority, loneliness, rejection, depression, anxiety, fear, panic, shame, self-loathing, tendency to self-harm to fatal ones, such as suicide", she concluded.
Suicides are preventable
UNICEF in Montenegro previously supported the establishment of the national children's SOS line 116-111. In addition, SOS line 080 888 888 is available to parents.
While reminding that suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the world, UNICEF called for breaking the taboo on mental health problems and providing better support to children, young people and their families in order to prevent suicide and to give every girl and boy in enabled Montenegro to fully realize its potential.
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