What should you do if your child is being bullied online?

What is hate speech?

This is understood to mean insults and hostility towards certain groups of people who make defamatory statements about other groups of people and also spread accusations and misinformation themselves.
Daniel Süss

How are children confronted with hate speech?

Via various social networks. Extremist and derogatory statements can emerge very quickly in their communicative environment. However, if you ask young people, most of them are very critical and reject hate speech. But they also experience hate speech as part of today's media culture.
Daniel Süss

In particularly serious cases, cyberbullying can lead to anxiety, depression or suicide.

Thomas Feibel

How can I take legal action against hate speech?

Switzerland recently introduced an offence that includes hate speech. The previous offence of racial discrimination has been extended to «discrimination and incitement to hatred». However, not everything that is labelled as hate speech by the media has legal significance. Many young people express themselves very crassly and inappropriately to each other, but do not feel that way themselves.
Martin Steiger, lawyer

What can cyberbullying do to my child?

Cyberbullying differs from bullying in that the incident receives an unmanageable amount of publicity online, can be shared unstoppably and cannot be deleted from the internet. This can trigger strong shame and agonising feelings of inferiority in the victim and lead to poor concentration and a drop in performance at school.

In particularly serious cases, cyberbullying can lead to anxiety, depression or suicide. This is why prevention work on this topic at home and at school is particularly important.
Thomas Feibel

What options do I have if my child is being bullied online?

From the victim's point of view, it is clear that contact should be made with the young person or their parents if the offender is known. At best, the contact should be accompanied by counselling centres that can provide low-threshold access to specialists, for example for mediation.

If this approach does not lead to a solution or is futile, the rule of law is utilised. In such cases, attempts are made to prohibit the perpetrators from engaging in disruptive behaviour by civil law means or to enforce a punishment.
Martin Steiger

What do I do if my child bullies other children?

I think it is very important that parents try to limit the consequences for the child. If they don't succeed in positively influencing the child's behaviour on their own or with external support, parents run the risk of the child going completely off the rails.

Because of their age, young people do a lot of stupid, sometimes cruel and incomprehensible things. Unfortunately, juvenile criminal law only applies up to the age of 18. The most important thing is to protect the child so that it can continue to develop positively.
Martin Steiger