Resolved: cyberbullying should be a criminal offence

In this speech I will be focusing on rebuttal, for surprisingly little of my first speech's constructive has been directly challenged. When I put the question to my opponent, what harm he thinks my model will bring, he told you it would be harder for cyberbullies to get jobs. He claims that ruining a person's life, self-esteem, power and ultimately job prospects, is correctly remedied by teaching people not to cyberbully. How many of us have been told in church to treat others as we want to be treated? How few of us do? My opponent responds to none of my analysis as to why a legal threat is needed for education to work. Besides, if harder work prospects for bullies is the worst thing that can come of this model, then that's a good thing too. It is good for employers, who know that some people are more prone to injure others. It is good for the victims because it gives them a sense of justice, which your counter-model does not provide. And it is good for the bullies themselves, as an effective deterrent from doing the crime again. My opponent makes a superficial case for why education prevents further harm in addition. It doesn't matter whether it does or doesn't, my opponent still needs to knock down my model before he can build up his. He later adds that it is unfair to criminalize something for adults and not for kids. I would gladly answer this question fully, but the chair has foolishly barred me from making any argument pertaining to adults. I also challenge the very question as it goes against the spirit of the motion and is therefore a squirreled point. I think it is fair to say this, however: if a blanket ban were to be imposed it would be optimal, but any effort to eradicate this nuisance must surely be better than none. Hate speech in the workplace is actually banned in most jurisdictions, unless it can be proven to be true. A similar sort of thing can be imposed for the cyberworld. Problem solved. Then my opponent talks about legal effectiveness and the Long Island example. In Long Island there was an 11% decline. This means that while previously (my estimate, based on the US-wide proportion) 5% of children felt threatened, now 4.45% felt threatened. Even with this totally unacceptably small drop, there are problems with these figures. Teens are less likely to report cyberbullying if they have been given a large-scale educational program telling them that it is not OK to cyberbully, because it gives them the impression that it is taboo within society and thus that people don't do it. Therefore when somebody does do it to them they do not identify it correctly and therefore do not report it. If cyberbullying really WAS taboo within society, as would be the case under a hybrid model (education and legal change), then this would not be the case. If cyberbullying was just made illegal, that fact in and of itself would educate people, especially if ratified by international convention, through the process I discussed earlier. That 45 states had no results is a lie - as it was not done as part of a study, we have no reliable statistics on whether or not it had an impact or how great this impact was. I tend to suspect it was somewhat higher than the Long Island case, but that is just my opinion against yours so the point is moot at best. Next my opponent says difficulty in conviction means that conviction is a waste of time. Great, so I guess we should abolish all trials with low conviction rates. Starting, as I alluded to, with rape. If we keep rape, you have nothing against cyberbullies. To this my opponent later stated that in rape, the intention and knowledge of harm is always crystal clear. In fact, this is a lie. Most of the time there are significant complications - in New Zealand, I know for instance that over three quarters of all rape trials concern rape where at least one party was drunk. It is also usually very hard to prove that the victim did not intend to consent, which of course must all be shown beyond reasonable doubt. It must be remembered that in criminal cases, if something is in doubt, it must work in favor of the defendant. He also claims that a bully's motivations are unclear, before going on to tell us exactly what a bully's motivations are. Either he lied to the house with his statements of a bully's motivations, or his judgment that a bully's motivations are unclear has shifted. Then my opponent tells you he agrees with all of my principles. Yay! Finally, my opponent conceeds that education, in many cases, does not work. He claimed this was because of the joy of suffering and lack of accountability to victims. These are exactly the problems that my model remedies. With a legal avenue for resolving these problems, you give the bullies pain to counteract their joy in others suffering, and hold them accountable for their actions. Answering my questions thus is almost the only substantive material my opponent added to his table of arguments. The other thing he said was that he supports the current laws banning some cyberbullying. While opposed to a blanket ban on cyberbullying, he admits the present legislation is good and working, but anything more is "our liberties. " Last time I checked, there was no freedom to cyberbully in the law. I have already debunked his reference to the first amendment, so I'd like my opponent, as one of his questions, to name and ask me to read a statute, case or declaration that proclaims the legality of cyberbullying and is in force today. He won't, because there isn't one. This debate is all about how to resolve the problem of cyberbullying. I have shown how all the key stakeholders are better off with a ban, why a ban is more effective than education alone and exactly how a ban would work. All my opponent has really said is that education might work too. I agree. But that does nothing to attack the motion, and neither is it mutually exclusive with my model - voters can agree with both of us and the motion would still fall to my side of the house, despite the fact that your model is so weak that it ignores more than half of the stakeholders and is ineffective in and of itself. Primarily, ladies and gentlemen, this debate is about fixing a menace on our world. You have two options - apply a band aid of education to the root of the issue, or do something more to heal it. Law is not all about penalizing, it is about healing too. Let us do something together to save our most vulnerable.