Dr. Mairéad Foody:

The example is so horrific it hits one in the face that even though it is a legal matter, it is also a civil and human matter. Most of the work we do is with young people but we just should not engage in adult-to-adult sharing. We have rights but there are responsibilities on us to act appropriately.

Young people are a little better at this because they have lived more in the online world and are fluid between both. For some reason, the adult generation seems to see it as being separate offline and online worlds. We do not seem to see that we have to be responsible online in the same way.

With regard the impact of bullying, the definition of bullying that we use in our work and research is that there has to be repetition, intent to cause harm, a negative impact and a power hierarchy. That holds for cyberbullying when it is peer-to-peer, but some of those things will be different. Deputy O'Callaghan mentioned that it might not be persistent. A person might take one photo, so it might be hard to penalise that person or say that he or she is perpetrating bullying because he or she has only done it once or shared it once. However, the impact on the victim is repetitive and those images have been shared all over the place. It is persistent in that sense and it is harder to see if there was intent to cause harm. Once those images are available, there will be an impact no matter what, because one does not know where they are and cannot imagine where they will go next. The ideas relating to intent needs to be changed. We need to think more about consent being sought and make sure that we have appropriate language, understanding that we should be asking for consent from the beginning before we take any image and share it. Rather than focusing on sexual or horrific content, it should be in our day-to-day language and we should flip the way society talks about it from being a separate, online issue. We should be asking for consent offline before taking a photo or sharing it. Young people are a bit better at doing that than adults.