Online Harassment

Online harassment can occur through e-mail, instant messages, chat rooms, and message boards and can range from menacing to annoying. Make sure that you are neither the victim nor the perpetrator of online harassment in any of these scenarios:

• Sending threats and stalking another person in one-on-one e-mails and instant messages
• Posting personal information and/or lies—which may be considered libel—about another person in public forums such as chat rooms, mailing lists (listservs) or in e-mail or instant messsages to third parties
• Threatening another person in one of these public forums

If you are receiving harassing messages that you feel threaten your personal safety, before you do anything else, contact the Ohio State University Police. Call 911 for emergencies and 292-2121 for non-emergency situations.

If the online harassment is not immediately or personally threatening, you have these options:

• You can ignore the messages, which may discourage the harasser and cause him/her to stop.
• If the harasser persists, you can respond to the person that you want no further contact and that you will consider any continued contact as harassment that you will report to the appropriate authorities.
• If the harassment escalates, you should contact OSU Police, as noted above.
• You can forward examples of the harassment to abuse@osu.edu and a representative will contact you to review options for dealing with the situation. If you're being harassed via e-mail, please be sure to include the full Internet headers of the message when forwarding examples.

If you don't know how to view the full Internet headers of an e-mail message, you can go to the OIT Help Desk and enter full headers in the search field to find the instructions for your e-mail program.

To avoid being accused of harassing behavior, always exercise restraint when communicating with others online and avoid using any language or information that could be construed as hurtful or potentially criminal. The perpetrator of online harassment offenses could be subject to university disciplinary action and civil and criminal penalties, including fines, if the victim in any of these scenarios chooses to prosecute.

For more legal interpretations, consult these references:

• Ohio State's IT document on Virtual Legality written by the university's legal counsel
• The Ohio State University's Policy on Responsible Use of University Computing Resources, which covers the appropriate use of computing resources and links to related issues