There has been a great deal of press coverage over recent weeks about the problems associated with the growth of social networking websites and increasing technological sophistication amongst children. One prominent issue is 'cyber bullying': the use of text messages, emails and websites to hurt, upset or embarrass another person.
The focus has been on the dangers faced by school pupils from cyber bullying. One 15 year old girl, Megan Gillan, committed suicide after being bullied through the social networking site Bebo. However, a survey carried out in April by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the Teacher Support Network suggests that teachers are also increasingly at risk of being the victims of cyber bullies. It found that one in seven teachers have been cyber bullied and of those, 68% had received unpleasant emails, 26% had been the subject of abuse on websites and 28% had received abusive text messages.
The problem is compounded by teachers' relative lack of technological sophistication compared to their pupils, the difficulty in identifying the perpetrators and the range of methods which have been used to cyber bully teachers. Obvious methods include setting up 'hate groups' on Facebook or MySpace, posting negative reviews on the bête noire of many teachers: Rate My Teacher, or sending abusive text messages. But there are other equally damaging methods such as hacking into a teacher's email account, sending viruses or using the school's own Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to disrupt or delete a teacher's work.
The survey highlighted the effects of cyber bullying upon teachers with 39% saying they suffered a blow to their confidence, 25% saying they felt the standard of their teaching was affected and 6% reporting that they were signed off work with stress or other related illness. Such statistics will be especially worrying to school leaders because they indicate a heightened risk of employment claims from teachers whose professional lives and health have been damaged as a result of cyber bullying.
Teachers who are minded to bring a claim cannot make a complaint to an employment tribunal for cyber bullying alone. They would need to link the abuse they suffered to the existing discrimination legislation or to show that the school has failed in the duty of care owed to its employees. This can be difficult, as demonstrated the case of Campbell v Falkirk Council in which a teacher unsuccessfully argued that he fell within the ambit of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 because he had been bullied by pupils on account of his baldness. Despite this, where cyber bullying takes the form of racist, sexist or homophobic abuse, schools should be particularly vigilant towards the risk of a discrimination claim.
There is a currently a legal hurdle for teachers who wish to bring claims under the discrimination legislation. Whilst a school will have liability for the acts of staff members who cyber bully other teachers in the course of their employment, as the law stands it will not have liability for discriminatory acts such as racist or homophobic abuse carried out by pupils. The 2003 House of Lords case of Pearce v Governing Body of Mayfield School involved a teacher who was harassed and bullied by pupils because she was a lesbian. The court found that the school was not liable for failing to act where a third party, such as a pupil, discriminates against or harasses its employees, unless the reason why the school failed to act was itself discriminatory. However, the law is changing and the forthcoming Equality Bill will make employers explicitly liable, in some circumstances, for harassment by third parties in the workplace.