Faculty Publications

State-Level Cyberbullying Policy: Variations In Containing A Digital Problem

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Violence and Society: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice

First Page

59

Last Page

79

Abstract

Cyberbullying is the use of information technology to deliberately hurt, taunt, threaten or intimidate someone. Currently, there are no federal statutes in the United States which directly address this problem. The response of the states has varied from attempting to use existing anti-bullying laws to limit cyberbullying to passing new laws that specifically target cyberbullying behavior. An important question is, "why are some states taking a lead in combating this cybercrime through new laws while others are relying on existing laws?" The literature on policy adoption suggests politics, resources and public need are important factors in predicting why certain states are more likely to enact government policies. This chapter analyzes the impact of these factors and others on policy adoption by exploring the level of legislative action to update existing cyberbullying laws for 2009 through 2014.

Department

Department of Political Science

Original Publication Date

11-2-2016

DOI of published version

10.4018/978-1-5225-0988-2.ch004

Repository

UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Language

en

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