Victoria Police serve intervention on Facebook

By Liz Tay on Oct 20, 2010 10:50 AM
Filed under Oddware

Court order served to online bully.

Victoria Police has served a cyberbullying intervention order via Facebook, after unsuccessful attempts to reach the accused by phone and in person.

The man was a "prolific Facebook user" who had allegedly threatened, bullied and harassed a former partner online.

Police were approached by the victim in August, but were unable to locate the accused by traditional means.

In what police believe to be an Australian first, the accused was served with an interim intervention order, extract, explanation, contacts and a video of Leading Senior Constable Stuart Walton via a Facebook private message.

The accused was ordered not to publish any material about the victim online, and not to contact the victim "by any means", including phone and e-mail, except through the police or a lawyer.

"If you do not obey this order, you may be arrested and charged with a criminal offense," Walton said in the video.

The accused did not attend Court as ordered, and police were unable to confirm that the message had been read. However, a Victorian Court Magistrate upheld the order indefinitely and a final order was served via Facebook.

Police finally succeeded in contacting the accused after the final order was served, and ascertained that he had read both interim and final documents via Facebook and agreed to comply.

"Internet bullying, stalking and intimidation are taken very seriously by Police. In this instance we were able to deliver justice through the same medium as the crime committed," Walson stated.

"Police will always pursue traditional means to enforce the law and to protect the community - but we won't shy away from innovative methods to achieve positive outcomes, either."

Facebook claims to take users' privacy "very seriously", and works with law enforcement "to the extent required by law".

In May, the Australian Federal Police called for Facebook to establish a local law enforcement contact who would be immediately accessible to Federal, state and territory agencies.

Victoria Police serve intervention on Facebook

10 comments in this discussion

"If you are being bullied, harrassed or someone is being a genuine pain in the backside can't you ban them from being able to send you messages and such from social networking sites. If not and ..."

By doobinator

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Comments: 10

realitybites Oct 20, 2010 12:06 PM	In my humble (and some would consider uneducated) opinion, if you don't want to come into contact with the undesirable aspect of human nature, don't use it. If people want to bully, insult, denigrate me they can do it the old fashioned way, personally or over the phone. Makes for a more interesting exchange ;)
johnpro2 Oct 20, 2010 12:26 PM	Well there you go ..real life reality show in the making. I suspect public warnings and warrants will be a reasonably common form of contacting people in the future as folk become more mobile in both abode & communication.
dubious Oct 20, 2010 12:33 PM	Absolutely right @realitybites... So now the Police have to divert their stretched resources to looking after people who don't know how to log out and stay out of a social networking site. Take responsibility for your choices people!! Some poor person is suffering at the hands of a "PHYSICALLY" abusive family member while you're surfing for masochistic content you quite probably brought on yourself.
gbyrneg50 Oct 20, 2010 7:53 PM	I don't know the facts of this particular case but Intervention orders are not considered particularly respectable by the legal fraternity. The "perpetrator" if we can call him that has not been convicted of a crime. Moreover "stalking" is another concept that is not considered respectable by the legal fraternity unless there is a really clear cut case. I think that there is considerable danger of abuse if we go down this road without safeguards.
X_Selectar Oct 21, 2010 2:35 AM	You'd think Victoria Police could simply ask for the perpetrator's IP address and track them through their ISP, this is a rather flimsy process, and probably meaningless under the law.
jfame Oct 21, 2010 5:30 PM	This case was not just about cyber bullying If you's knew the facts you would know that the 'victim' had a previous intervention order against the offender for more serious allegations and that the offender patiently waited till it finished to contact the 'victim' via facebook. 'Dubious' I think you are ignorant and insensitive for saying "Some poor person is suffering at the hands of a "PHYSICALLY" abusive family member while you're surfing for masochistic content you quite probably brought on yourself" You do not know the extent of the situation and this 'victim' has every right to freely use their facebook or any other networking site and should be able to feel safe doing so. You are literally justifying the offenders wrong doings it was the only way for the police to give the intervention order so if the offender did try and contact her again they could do something about it. It's people like you who makes this world an ugly place!
gbyrneg50 Oct 22, 2010 10:35 AM	Intervention orders are OK for genuinely serious cases. However there are many cases of abuse. I think that the following website gives some disturbing examples of abuse. http://www.isaacschambers.com.au/intervention_orders.htm
Mergwen Oct 22, 2010 11:55 AM	Score one for Victoria Police. All they have to do now is control the cyber bullying and intimidation practiced by some of their own members.
X_Selectar Oct 24, 2010 2:19 AM	This is all a bit confusing. 1.) Everyone agrees to TOS, Terms of Service when joining a Web Forum/Site, whatever you'd like to call it. 2.) Generally the terms, "abusive, deflamatory behaviour", must be agreed to to be a member, and are not tolerated, and will lead to being banned from the site. 3.)As a Moderator, Web Site operator, it is also possible as I have had to do myself, to flag a IP adress, and never allow that person, or Address to re join, or even see the site, in my case. I assume there are some further facts I'm not aware of, but as I've said, I don't see how this all "played out online". The Police surely have enough info to take this person to a court, through Facebook records of the user. I know I deleted my Facebook account when I saw they had crawled the Web, and put up links to Videos at other sites, and other personal info which I had not added, or permitted Facebook to add personally to my profile. People need to check on things like this, I wasn't impressed, but I digress. First things first; always read the Terms of Service before joining any Web based site.
doobinator Oct 28, 2010 6:55 AM	If you are being bullied, harrassed or someone is being a genuine pain in the backside can't you ban them from being able to send you messages and such from social networking sites. If not and people can do these things to anyone they like then don't join them in the first place. Make the people who are creating these sites start to take responsibility for them and provide some security for it's users. As X_Selectar says it's in the TOS of most if not all web site member services and forums that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated so why do the admins and moderators of facebook not take action. I don't blame the police for taking what ever action they had to but surely if the bullying and such was being done through that medium then surely there had to be a way to put a stop to it.