The gist of your augment seems to be that cyberbullying is simply the digital version of offline prejudice and hate based bullying and that people working in this area are idiots who believe that we can blame technology for social ills in order to not have to do anything that actually addresses it. I’ve worked extensively in this area, and I can confidently say I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t understand that cyberbullying is at root a social problem. They also have a resolutely better grasp than you display here of the impact of the social web on shaping and creating social mores, the impact of the mainstreaming of the social web and continuing rapid emergence of new technologies and practices has on social and legal practice, and the broad variety ways in which individuals and organisations currently understand and respond to both old and new challenges. It’s also unfortunately true to say that technologically mediated bullying doesn’t confine itself to the established gutters of prejudice and hate related abuse. Anyone who has worked in any area of abuse understands the practical purpose of naming and defining. Unless a victim understands that what has/is happening to them is socially not acceptable, that they have the ability to articulate that abuse and can be understood by someone with the power to support them, abusers get away with it. Bullying, like some other forms of abuse, rely on the victim (or people who are in a position to support a target) believing that what is happening to them is a personal issue rather than a political and social/legal one. I’ve talked to lots of kids about their experiences of being cyberbullied and of trying to get support. One ten year old I spoke to said to me, “I wouldn’t tell my teacher about what was happening. She wouldn’t understand what it was I was talking about and I’d be too upset to explain it to her.” This girl was talking explicitly about her teachers ability to understand how she and her friends were using technology, and her suspicion that because her teacher didn’t understand the social web, that she would be dismissive of the seriousness of technologically mediated bullying. Cyberbullying is a marker for developing a shared understanding of how technology can be misused to abuse people, and for organising our community response to combat new practices. Cyberbullying isn’t, in itself, a category of abuse – and in the UK we don’t have a cyberbullying law. We address it across a range of legislation, some of which looks specifically at behaviours, some of which does specifically address the abusive use of technologies. Are you suggesting that, for example, the Malicious Communications Act is pointless, since it is not the abuse of communications technology to harm others that matters, but just that someone is being nasty to someone else in the first place? I’ve talked to kids whose home life is completely disrupted by barrages of silent calls. It is extremely difficult to dislocate the method of abuse from the intention in those kinds of cases. It would be hard how to know how to practically or legally support the victim in those cases without acknowledging the impact of technology. Cyberbullying is also critically not just an online version of offline behaviour. Technology is not a mirror – it doesn’t passively reflect society. It can reinscribes social inequalities, but it also rearticulates and critically, develops them. Cyberbullying is critically different from offline bullying in a range of ways. Some of the most important differences include the potential time and location in which bullying takes place/is experienced; the rapidity in which bullying acts are distributed and the fact that these can be hosted and accessed from multiple sites; the profile of the perpetrator and person being bullied – which is no longer dependent on familiar power hierarchies; the persistence and discoverability of materials; the potential anonymity of the perpetrator and viewers. Your argument seems to me to do what you accuse the cowards hiding behind the word cyberbullying of – over simplify the argument to the point where it is easy to dismiss.