Mr. Paul C. Dwyer:

There are some countries that have a much more mature culture and approach to this matter. There are different levels and points of pain for younger or older children and some for adults. In the United States, there are 20,000 cyber-related attempted suicides every year. We may ask how they are learning from this, but they are at the cutting edge involving the change in culture within schools and organisations. We can see that from statistics coming from Facebook about online behaviour.

In Italy, for example, directors of the major search engines are being taken away in handcuffs because they have not prevented bullying on their search engines and websites. That focuses the minds of everybody involved in using and dealing with this enterprise commercially. The culture has a massive knock-on effect in terms of dealing with that because the directors are told that they will end up in jail if they do not take responsibility for dealing with these issues. It is no longer just a case of words on paper.

The solution to this lies in overall responsibility of the people who are commercially making money from this. We have to take into context the fact that there are sites making a living from facilitating cyberbullying. Some of these are in our European neighbours, but not within our own jurisdiction. Why should they be allowed to broadcast, operate and make money from our citizens, including children, by preying on trolls and Internet cyber predators? Those are the ones we need to go after initially.

However, there is no silver bullet, so a collective effort is required between states to deal with it. Perhaps that would follow through within the culture of parenting. Parents could ask their children about the websites they are using - are they hosted in Latvia, Ireland, Italy or the United States? In effect, that would give adults enough knowledge to empower them to ask children what playground they are playing in. Those located in this jurisdiction may be quite safe if they are monitored, but other sites are ones to be afraid of. We have to keep it in that context but, unfortunately, there is no silver bullet.