After the death of Grace McComas (15 years old), many events have been organized to honor her life and fight her killer: cyber-bullying.  From vigils to reflect on her life and events to promote a positive cyber-space, such as Kindness for Grace, House Bill 396 has to be the most successful thus far.  Not even a year after her passing, already the community and the government have realized that cyber-space grows more and more dangerous every day.  Not only predators are threatening the lives of children, but also their peers.  With the new additions to the pre-existing cyber-bullying laws, many children on social media sites will find more support from the law when it comes to being harassed.

Previously, cyber-bullying counted only as directly harassing or annoying someone by messaging their inbox or tagging them, without due purpose of the law.  Also, cyber-bullying charges could not even be pressed unless the predator was asked to stop but continued to maliciously engage with his victim.  It is a great relief to parents and social media users that the bullies’ loopholes have been closed.

Predators can now be punished for making a fake profile of a minor or another person, posing in a chat group as that person or repeatedly following her in chat groups.  Such other infractions of the law are as follows; online sexual harassment that includes posting information or images that include private, personal or sexual information of the victim and/or encouraging others to do so too.  The final infraction listed will close many loopholes including a very popular form on Twitter.  Twitter users know it as “sub-tweeting” or tweeting to all their followers without any direct statement towards a particular person or group.  Up until House Bill 396 was passed, this was a very common form of cyber-bullying that was easy to get away with because of the indirectness of the statements.  Now, if a statement is made, whether true or false, intending to provoke or is likely to provoke a third party to harass or stalk the minor, that action is illegal.  That means, making statements or “sub-tweeting” hurtful statements about someone can be charged as cyber-bullying if others join in.  This adjustment to the law alone will diminish cyber-bullying rates immensely.

Hope continues to blossom as cyber-space begins to change.  To many parents, this change is a blessing.  Some children that are harassed online are bullied to a point of contemplating suicide.  With the addition of this law, many can rest easy knowing that this law can save the lives of those victims.  If ignoring the bully, asking the bully to stop and trying to go through the school for protection doesn’t work, you can be assured the bully will be stopped by either a $500 fine or a year imprisonment in jail, or both.  As it goes, for those who are fighting cyber-bullying, in honor of Grace or a friend or just because, the ratification of this law is a win.  Celebrate this law in hopes that it truly will make cyber-space a more gracious space.