What Can a Parent Do About Cyberbullying?

09 Nov 2026

9 Min Read

Dr Sia Chin Chin (Academic Contributor), The Taylor's Team (Editor)

IN THIS ARTICLE

An 11-year-old girl heard from another student that a classmate had shared her photograph in a WhatsApp group with a humiliating caption. By then the messages had been circulating late at night, outside school hours, long before she knew.

Her mother is Dr Sia Chin Chin, a barrister and a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law and Governance, where she is also Programme Director of the Master of Laws programmes. She knew the law well, yet the right first step was far from clear. That uncertainty led her to research cyberbullying. It started, she said, with 'a simple but painful question many parents ask: "What can I do to help my child?"'

A Problem Far Larger Than One Family

Cyberbullying has two sides, and Malaysian figures show how often teenagers are on the sending end. In the National Health and Morbidity Survey 2022, run by the Institute for Public Health, 33,523 students aged 13 to 17 answered questions about their behaviour online. About 1 in 5 said they had bullied or harassed someone through the internet, a phone or another device, which was 22.7% of boys and 13.9% of girls. The most common behaviours were making rude comments (11.3%) and spreading rumours (6.9%), and 4.8% had sent or posted someone else's embarrassing photos, the same thing that was done to Dr Sia's daughter.

The two other places in the study report large numbers as well. Japan's Ministry of Education recorded 769,022 bullying cases in schools in the 2024 school year, which ran from April 2024 to March 2025, the highest total in its annual surveys. In Europe, the European Commission reports that 1 in 6 adolescents have experienced cyberbullying and 1 in 8 admit to taking part.

Behind each of these figures is a family working out what to do next, as Dr Sia's did. A lawyer had not known where to begin, which made her wonder how many other parents face the same uncertainty at their own dinner tables. The distance between what the law says and what a worried parent can actually do on the night itself became the subject of her research.

Today, that work is backed by RM198,000 awarded to Dr Sia under Phase 2 of the 2026 Exploratory and Transformative Research Grant (GET) from the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia (MOHE), for a study titled 'A Comparative Legal Framework for Combating Cyberbullying: Transforming Adolescent Mental Health Outcomes for Families, Schools, and Policymakers'. Over 3 years, her team will compare how Malaysia, Japan and the European Union respond to cyberbullying and look for the responses that help young people feel safer and recover. 'If our work can help even one young person feel less alone and one family find support sooner,' she said, 'then it will have made a difference.'

What Malaysian Law Covers and Where Parents Get Stuck

Malaysia now has several laws that apply. Amendments to the Penal Code that took effect in 2025 created offences for harassment, threats and sharing someone's personal information, and the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 continues to apply. The Online Safety Act 2025, in force since 1 January 2026, requires licensed online platforms to put safeguards for children and tools for reporting harm in place. The Anti-Bullying Act 2026, which received royal assent in January, sets up a tribunal that can award compensation and issue protection orders to victims.

Dr Sia points to four gaps that families still meet. Harmful content spreads in seconds while investigations take time. Many parents and children do not know where to ask for help. Anonymous or private accounts make evidence hard to gather and offenders hard to identify. And laws can punish harm after it has happened, but they cannot teach empathy or stop cruelty from starting.

Her own family's experience shows how this works in practice. A parent can collect screenshots, report the content to the platform, speak to the other child's parents and the school, and, if there are threats or persistent harassment, make a police report. The school can investigate, arrange counselling and take disciplinary action, and the police can act where there is evidence of a crime, although how far they can go depends on the evidence and on how quickly the people responsible can be identified. 'The law can deter and punish, but it cannot by itself provide immediate emotional support, educate young people about responsible online behaviour, or ensure that victims know where to seek help,' Dr Sia said.

She still sees a clear legal route as a form of support in itself. It gives families somewhere to turn, encourages earlier reporting, allows harmful content to be taken down before it spreads further, and tells a victim that what happened to them is taken seriously, which reduces the isolation many victims feel.

Comparing Malaysia, Japan and the European Union

A comparative legal study looks at how different countries deal with the same problem and weighs the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Dr Sia chose three places that respond in different ways. Malaysia has recently strengthened its framework with specific offences and the Online Safety Act, which makes it an important emerging model in Southeast Asia. Japan places weight on child welfare and prevention in schools, and revised its policies after several cases that drew national attention. The European Union focuses on the accountability of online platforms and on children's rights online, using rules such as the Digital Services Act, which sets duties for technology companies, and in February 2026 the European Commission published an action plan against cyberbullying.

Dr Sia's comparison looks beyond what each statute says. Court decisions and enforcement actions show how a law works in practice, since one that looks strong on paper can be hard to enforce while another works well because courts have developed clear remedies for victims. School policies and government guidelines matter as well, particularly in Japan, where schools play a central role. Interviews and consultations may bring in educators, parents, legal practitioners, policymakers, mental health professionals and child-rights advocates, so the findings show how the laws are used as well as how they are written.

For Dr Sia, the study will have worked if a child who is hurt online knows who to turn to, and the adults around them know what to do that same night. She hopes to find the approaches that make a young person feel safe enough to speak up, that bring a family support before the hurt settles in, and that help a child find their footing again. 'We are less interested in which country has the most laws than in which approaches help adolescents feel safer, seek help earlier, and recover more effectively from online harm,' Dr Sia said.

Dr Sia Chin Chin, in glasses and a patterned batik dress, leans towards a young woman holding a tablet as they talk in the lecture theatre seats at Taylor's University.

A Team From Law, Education and Psychology

Dr Sia says most studies look at cyberbullying through law, education or psychology alone. Her project brings the three together and treats cyberbullying as a child protection, mental health and social responsibility issue as well as a legal one.

To see one case through several pairs of eyes, Dr Sia has gathered colleagues who know different parts of a young person's world. In Japan, Professor Yuichi Toda of Osaka Kyoiku University brings the classroom perspective of an educator, alongside Professor Tomoyuki Kanetsuna of Kagawa University, a social psychologist whose research covers bullying, including internet-related problems. Closer to home, two medical doctors from the Ministry of Health, Dr Nurhafizah binti Sahidan and Dr Farah Waheeda binti Ahmad Faraid, studied Taylor's Master of Laws in Healthcare and Medical Law, a programme Dr Sia directs. Dr Mogana Sunthari and Dr Jenita Kanapathy join from Taylor's to complete the team.

The project builds on the Japan and ASEAN International Legal Studies and Governance Dialogue on cyberbullying and the rights of women, parents and children, which Dr Sia leads with funding from the Japan Foundation from 2024 to 2026. The dialogues have brought academics, educators, regulators, civil society organisations, students, parents and industry partners into the same conversation, which gives the new study a network of people to consult from its first day.

Five panellists seated on red armchairs in front of a glass wall at Taylor's University, with Dr Sia Chin Chin second from the right.

What began as one family's painful experience has grown into a series of international conversations at Taylor's Impact Lab. What makes their story resonate with parents, lawyers, educators and regulators, and why are so many still showing up to be part of the conversation?

READ THE FULL STORY

Dr Sia's earlier funded work includes the Startup Ecommerce Law for Young Entrepreneurs (SELFYE) project, a UNESCO-supported community project that promoted legal literacy among young entrepreneurs in 2022. She received the Exemplary Meritorious Academic Staff Award at Taylor's in 2020 and 2022, and she has spoken as an invited panellist for the World Intellectual Property Organization and contributed to the International Telecommunication Union's Focus Group on Metaverse.

Helping the Next Family Know What to Do

GET is a new scheme from MOHE that supports high-risk, high-impact research on national priorities. Applicants are also asked to explain the value their research will return in policy influence, societal impact and capacity building. For Dr Sia, the funding means 'an affirmation of collective responsibility'. Through GET, she said, her experience as a parent can grow into 'research, dialogue, and solutions that can benefit many others who may be as uncertain as me when I started the project'.

Malaysia is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognises the responsibility to give children a safe environment, and the project extends that discussion to the digital world. The comparison is expected to produce evidence-based recommendations that could inform law reform, regulation and child protection policy. Parents, schools and communities should get clearer guidance on recognising, reporting and responding to cyberbullying, which supports earlier intervention.

The study will produce an evidence-based framework that brings legal, educational and child protection perspectives together, and Dr Sia hopes it gives families something to pick up on the hardest evening: a practical guide to what to do when cyberbullying happens. Schools will gain clear protocols for stepping in and supporting students, and policymakers will receive recommendations drawn from international practice. Along the way, the team will publish research papers and policy briefs, hold workshops with stakeholders, and create media and artwork to carry the message further. Where young people and families take part directly, the research follows approved ethics protocols, with consent and safeguarding measures in place.

For a young person who meets cyberbullying now, her advice is to speak first to a school counsellor or a trusted parent or guardian. 'I hope all of us remember that behind every statistic is a child sitting at a dinner table, trying to make sense of something that has deeply hurt them,' she said. 'If this research helps us respond with greater understanding, faster support, and better protection, then it will have achieved its purpose.'

Interested in research like this? Dr Sia's project can involve postgraduate students from law, psychology, education, governance and public policy backgrounds. The School of Law and Governance offers the Master of Laws, the Master of Laws in Healthcare and Medical Law and the Doctor of Philosophy in Law. Speak to one of our education counsellors to explore your options and find the right path for you.

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