Ctrl + Alt + Remedy? Child Rights, Access to Justice and Preventive Responses to Cyberbullying in the European Union

This study examines how European Union Member States address cyberbullying affecting children through legal and policy frameworks, paying particular attention to children’s rights. It employs a qualitative, document-based comparative methodology, applying a harmonized codebook to analyze definitional, legal, preventive, and reactive responses across all 27 EU Member States. The analytical framework is grounded in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child, the Better Internet for Kids (BIK+) initiative, and the Digital Services Act, which serve as normative benchmarks. Coding draws on EU-level harmonized sources, including Joint Research Centre outputs and the 2025 BIK policy reports, and aggregates the findings into a composite structural indicator capturing the formal regulatory and policy coverage of cyberbullying from a child rights perspective. The results indicate a high level of formal regulatory attention in most Member States, particularly regarding criminal law protection, educational prevention, and institutional reporting mechanisms. However, child-specific and child-friendly elements—such as explicit cyberbullying definitions, adapted reporting procedures, and tailored civil law remedies—remain uneven and limited. The study concludes that, despite comprehensive formal regulation, significant gaps persist in the integration of child-centered and access-to-justice-oriented mechanisms, underscoring the need for strengthened child rights approaches and further research on implementation and children’s lived experiences.