A man who sent images of a half-naked ex girlfriend to work colleagues and another who sent a sex tape of his victim to her mother are among seven people jailed since new cyber-bullying laws came into force.

Already, 89 criminal charges have been laid related to online harassment and seven people have been jailed using the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA), which has been in place since July 2015.

They include a Nelson man who added his then-partner's mother, whom he had never met, on Facebook, then sent her a message with a video of her daughter engaged in a sex act with someone else.

Aaron Stephen Tamihana, then 28, sent the video attachment in November 2015 to the mother, whom he knew disapproved of the relationship, with the comment: "what your daughter's really up to".

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She opened and played it, to both mother and daughter's horror, said the judge who jailed him for 11 months this April and called his actions both "sinister" and "cowardly".

Two more men are currently before the courts in Wellington facing HDCA charges.

A 43-year-old man is charged with posting a photo and a 38-year-old Miramar man is charged with posting an intimate recording.

The new figures were revealed by Justice Minister Amy Adams in a speech to NetSafe.

She said there had also been three home detentions, five community work sentences, one community detention, and one supervision sentence.



One of the cases involved a man jailed for sending half-naked photos of his ex-girlfriend to a shared work email address, she said.



The penalties for an offence under the Act include a fine of up to $50,000, maximum two years' jail for an individual, or up to $200,000 for a body corporate.

NetSafe chief executive Martin Cocker said the theme to the criminal cases tended to be relationship break up-related.

Sharing intimate images and footage without permission was a common theme, as well as online harassment, stalking and abusing privacy.

Despite teens' high use of social media, there had been just one criminal case go into the Youth Court, Cocker said.

"It's males, typically in that age group 20-40 that are offending under the Act."

There was also a theme of secrets shared in the relationship being shared online by ex-partners in a breach of confidence once it dissolved, Cocker said.

Adams referenced the "Roastbusters" scandal, saying the young Auckland men who allegedly bragged online about sex with underage girls were a clear example of people "using social media to continue to harass and demean their victims long after the initial attack".



She also noted in 2009, a Rotorua schoolgirl took her own life after receiving what the coroner described as "extraordinarily abusive" text messages, and in 2013 a Palmerston North 15-year-old died after being bullied online.



Adams said victims of online harassment can now expect to know between 48 hours to 96 hours after making a complaint whether content will be pulled down.

Cocker said

NetSafe was currently receiving about 8000 calls about online abuse annually, and expected that to double that after its new role as the help-centre for complaints begins in a fortnight.



The era of smartphones and social media saturation brought new challenges, Adams said.



"A single post or tweet can be shared around the world thousands of times and across millions of screens within seconds yet its repercussions can cause lasting damage."

CYBER ABUSE

This May a Hamilton man who covertly filmed a 16-year-old female friend having sex with him and later uploaded the footage to Facebook was jailed for a year.

Henare Pera Hohaia, of Christchurch, sent 321 abusive and sometimes threatening Facebook messages to a former employer. The messages including hand-drawn pictures showing a gun being held to the back of the woman's head, and an apparent threat to shoot her pet horses. A judge noted his apparent mental illness and imposed one year's supervision and medical treatment this April.

Christchurch man David James McBain sent an intimate image of a woman and a threatening text to her new partner. He was sentenced to nine months' jail last month for that offending and other charges.





