Emergency injunction in the UK

There are circumstances where the court will be willing to grant you an emergency injunction to protect you from an imminent risk of blackmail or harassment.

Read more: Emergency harassment injunction

Can you harass someone indirectly?

You can harass someone by indirect harassment by applying the harassing activities to somebody else. Harassment can be direct or indirect. The harassment can aim at the victim directly or at the victim through a third party.

What is indirect harassment

How can harassment be indirect

How do you prove indirect harassment

Online indirect harassment

Indirect harassment examples

What to do if you are being indirectly harassed

What is indirect harassment

Indirect harassment occurs when the harassment is directed at a third party but is really aimed at you. In online harassment, the harasser might target members of your family your friends, your partner or your business and business associates.

How can harassment be indirect

Harassment occurs when the harasser is intending cause the victim to feel distressed or anxious. Therefore, harassers sometimes target the people who are close to the victim. They try to either terrorise them or frighten the victim through the contact they are having with the victim’s associates. In many cases, the harasser will convince himself that he holds a high moral ground or that she is performing an important deed by making unsolicited contact with the victim’s associates.

How do you prove indirect harassment

If the harasser begins to contact individuals who are associated with the victim, for no apparent reason other than their link or connection with the victim, it is possible to infer from the harasser’s conduct that the harasser is intending to harass the victim through those communications.

For example, if the harasser is contacting the employer of the victim to tell the employer about the victim’s alleged conduct towards the harasser, and if the harasser also contacts other associates of the victim, then it is likely that the harasser’s conduct would be considered harassment. In those cases, the victim needs to show that there is no reason for the harasser to make those communications to third parties, other than to harass the victim.

Online indirect harassment

The harasser might publish posts about the victim or in relation to the victim without mentioning the victim’s name but with the knowledge that the victim will become aware of the posts and that he will become distressed as a result. There is no need for the harasser to mention a particular name or even have their harassing posts distributed to many people.

Sometimes, the publication of a single web page, which might contain a hidden threat to the victim, could be considered an act of harassment, even if the web page has no viewers. It is enough that the victim is aware of the existence of the web page and/or of the hidden, or concealed threat on the web page for the harassment to occur.

Indirect harassment examples

Indirect harassment examples might include:

• Publishing an abusive post that refers to the victim by inference
• Sending unsolicited emails to the victim employee with complaints about the victim
• Warning the victim's partner of the victim's alleged behaviour towards her ex-boyfriend
• Targeting the victim's client-base or contact list with emails that contain true or false information about the victim
• Sending unsolicited emails to the victim’s contacts list

What to do if you are being indirectly harassed

Sometimes, because of the conniving nature of indirect harassment, the victim might be unsure whether they are in fact being harassed. Our advice is that if you feel harassed, then it is likely that you are being harassed. You should seek legal advice from an expert lawyer who will advise you whether the indirect harassment has crossed the necessary legal threshold to be considered civil or criminal harassment, and if so, the lawyer will also advise you of the step you could and perhaps need to take in order to resolve the situation before it might be too late.

Identifying user accounts on Instagram

There will be occasions where you might want to find out who is behind an Instagram account. You can obtain a disclosure order which will compel Instagram to disclose users’ information. This article helps you with the process of identifying user accounts on Instagram

Read more: Instagram disclosure

Legal action for harassment on Twitter

If you suffer harassment on Twitter and wish to take legal action against your harassers, you will need to follow these steps.

Is it harassment or a public debate

Is doxing considered as harassment

How to take out an injunction against a Twitter harasser

Do you need to give your harasser notice before taking them to court for harassment on Twitter

How to identify your Twitter harasser

Gathering evidence of your harassment on Twitter

Is it harassment or a public debate

It is important to differentiate between harassment and a legitimate public debate as often on Twitter the two issues tend to get mixed up. As a rule of thumb, if you engage with the Twitter post, this will be most likely considered as participation in a public debate. For this reason, you should never reply or engage with your Twitter harasser as the court will be reluctant to intervene in what the court may consider as a legitimate public debate. So the volume and nature of the Twitter posts might support a case for harassment but if you engage with at least some of the posts, this may position your case as a case of legitimate public debate rather than harassment.

Is doxing considered as harassment

Doxing often involves the accumulation and the publication of private information where those involved in the doxing create a new form of data that includes private information about their victim. This may be true even if the information has been collected from public sources. Doxing may be considered harassment as well as a breach of the privacy of the victim and a breach of the victim’s data protection rights.

How to take out an injunction against a Twitter harasser

To take out an injunction against a Twitter harasser, you will need to present a reasonably good case that will show, first, that you are being harassed and, second, that the person you are accusing of harassment is in fact your Twitter harasser. If the court is convinced that you are being harassed, you may be granted an injunction to prevent harassment of yourself.

Do you need to give your harasser notice before taking them to court for harassment on Twitter

In most cases, before you can start a court case of harassment on Twitter, you will need to approach the perpetrators with a letter before legal action, which would set out their wrongdoings. The court is unlikely to grant you an injunction if you haven't given the harasser notice of your intention to take them to court. However, this step might not be necessary in cases where the most significant element of the harassment involves the threat to publish private information about you on Twitter. In such a case, you will probably not want to give your Twitter harasser any prior notice about your intention to seek an injunction to prevent the publication of the private information.

How to identify your Twitter harasser

More often than not, the person who is harassing you on Twitter will use a pseudonym so you will not know what their real identity is. You will therefore need to find out who your Twitter harasser is, before making an injunction application to the court. To do this, we will need to take steps to identify your harassers. This will involve making an application to the court and to Twitter to allow Twitter to release to us all the information they have pertaining to the identification of your trolls.

Gathering evidence of your harassment on Twitter

Before making the application for a disclosure order, will need to gather the evidence, linking each of the harassers to the relevant Twitter posts. Essentially, there are two parts to the evidence gathering stage. The first is to show that you have been harassed and the second, is to focus on each of the harassers and the parts they played in harassing you. We will then communicate with Twitter to seek disclosure orders through the court, which will, hopefully, help us reveal some of the identities of your Twitter harassers. Once we have identified your trolls, we will need to write to them and put them on notice of our intention to take them to court. This letter is effectively a harassment warning that gives your harasser an opportunity to cease and desist their harassing activities. 

Harassment injunctions and social media disclosure order

There are often a number of stages before you can obtain a civil injunction for harassment or for breach of privacy. You should always try to optimise your resources to obtain the maximum benefit in return for the highest likelihood of success

How much does it cost to get a disclosure order from Facebook, Google or Twitter

How much does it cost to get an injunction for harassment or for breach of privacy

How to budget for harassment or privacy injunction applications

What are the steps in obtaining harassment injunctions

How much does it cost to get a disclosure order from Facebook, Google or Twitter

Disclosure orders from social media companies typically cost £5,000 + VAT. The actual cost of the disclosure order/s depends on the amount of work that is needed, particularly in relation to the evidence. If we were to apply on your behalf for two or more disclosure orders, the cost per order will be lower because some of the work will be duplicated.

How much does it cost to get an injunction for harassment or for breach of privacy

The cost of obtaining an injunction for harassment or for breach of privacy would depend on how swiftly the process goes and on the amount of evidence. Whether the defendant is known or unknown to you and whether the defendant is intending to defend the injunction will have a significant impact on the cost of obtaining the injunction. The higher the amount of evidence, the higher the cost is likely to be. Furthermore, there are other factors too, which are outside our control and may potentially affect the cost of obtaining an injunction for harassment or for breach of privacy.

For example, a particular judge could be unsympathetic or even unfamiliar with the type of work so he or she might refuse to grant an injunction, which we otherwise would expect to obtain. The judge might decide to postpone the hearing to another day for various reasons, which means an extra court hearing to account for. Likewise, third parties may mount an objection to the injunction application. Whilst we expect most applications for an injunction under the Protection from Harassment Act or under privacy law to go very smoothly, it is difficult to say for certain that this will be the case for every application.

We have done injunction applications with the cost of the legal proceedings being anything between £10,000 -£150,000. The range is huge. For this reason, our advice is to take each step at a time and to make informed decisions accordantly and regularly, both in terms of strategy and finances. We will always make sure that you are fully informed about your legal options and about the costs of each step in the legal process. You will be able to withdraw your case at various break points if you felt that the burden was too much for you.

How to budget for harassment or privacy injunction applications

Most people have a limited budget to invest in obtaining harassment or privacy injunctions. For most people, the important thing is to prevent harassment and to stop the dissemination of private information. Obtaining harassment or privacy injunctions is simply the method you would use to achieve your objective. For a start, you might want to decide and be clear about what are the most important things for you to achieve and to utilise your resources in the best way you can to achieve them.

We will help you optimise your resources and develop a strategy that is right for you. Then, we will work out the steps that we need to take to attain your objectives. There will be activities such as preparations and analysing of the evidence, that are labour intensive but that will be useful for various subsequent tasks.

Generally speaking, the preservation of the evidence, whilst labour intensive, is the type of undertaking that usually has to be carried out from the outset. In cases of harassment, often, the most pressing matter is to gather the evidence and to then prepare the Harassment Notice and serve it on the harasser. This is highly likely to resolve most harassment incidents without the need to take out an injunction. At the same time, contacting social media companies to take down harassing or offending posts might be as important.

What are the steps in obtaining harassment injunctions

The first step is the gathering and preservation of the evidence. Next, is the preparation and the service of a Harassment Notice on the harasser. If after this, you still need to commence legal action in order to obtain an injunction to protect you from harassment, the next step would be to file for a claim with the High Court and for an application for an injunction.

The filing of legal proceedings by itself is likely in most cases to result in a quick desire to settle by your harasser. If the case isn't resolved at that stage, it would mean that you will need to go through the various ligation processes. These may range from drafting detailed particulars of claims, giving your harasser an opportunity to file a defence, applying for a summary judgment or in the most extreme case conducting a trial. Going to trial will be the most expensive outcome for you, yet the far least likely to materialise.

Does the threat of breach of privacy constitute harassment?

Breach of privacy and even the threat of breach of privacy could constitute harassment even though a claim for breach of privacy is often brought in addition to a claim for harassment

Can the threat of breach of privacy be considered harassment

Can you obtain an injunction for the threat of breach of privacy

Can you stop the disclosure of private information which is embarrassing

Can you apply for a privacy injunction over false information

Can the threat of breach of privacy be considered harassment

Harassment often involves a breach of the victim’s privacy. In some cases, there would be a threat by the harasser to breach the victim’s privacy but there does need to be an actual breach of the victim’s privacy by the harasser because the threat itself, or having the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head, is enough to constitute harassment.

Can you obtain an injunction for the threat of breach of privacy

In recent years, it has become more difficult to obtain an interim or an urgent injunction for harassment. Mainly because of freedom of speech concerns, judges are reluctant to grant an injunction for harassment where the harassment is concerning internet posts. However, in relation to harassment that involves the victim’s breach of your privacy, or the threat of breaching the victim’s privacy, it is still possible to apply and to be granted a privacy injunction on an emergency basis, often without having to give prior notice to the harasser.

Can you stop the disclosure of private information which is embarrassing

Under English law, everyone is entitled to a right to private life, even if there are aspects of their private life, which are unpleasant, immoral or even harmful. Where the sharing of intimate relationships is concerned, if someone is about the share your private information, or has already shared it online, regardless of whether the information shared is true, the reasonable expectation of privacy exists in nearly all instances of intimate relationships. There are many instances of breach of privacy where the disclosure of details of intimate relationships could lead to the grant of an emergency injunction.

Can you apply for a privacy injunction over false information

When the shared private information is false, the harassment victim might also have a claim under defamation of character, in addition to a claim for breach of privacy. Whenever there is a significant breach of privacy and/or breach of personal data, the victim may be granted an injunction from the outset and without a trial. This is helpful if you are either trying to prevent the misuse of private information, or where the misuse of the private information or the breach of personal data that has already occurred, is still limited in scope.

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How to bring private prosecution against online harassers

Anyone or any company that is a victim of online harassment can bring their own private prosecution to the criminal courts and be protected from harassment immediately.  If you have an online harassment case and want to bring it to the criminal courts you should report the harassment to the police. There might however, be cases where you are dissatisfied with the police handling of your case or the slow speed by which matters are moving. 

Read more: Private prosecution of harassment