Excursus: “Bullying as a Criminal Offence”: Consideration of the Current Legal Classification of Bullying in Germany

As in most other EU Member States, legal remedies for victims of bullying exist in Germany only to the extent that certain individual acts of a bullying process can be considered general criminal offences (e.g. insult, threat). However, typical bullying activities are much more subtle and low-threshold and thus not punishable even as individual acts. Here, as in the case of stalking, it is the sum of the many individual acts and the duration in which they are applied that injures the victim psychologically and physically. The legal protection often cited by the opponents of an anti-bullying law as being sufficient, which is available to the person affected, is thereby undermined. The legal classification of bullying judges itself only after whether the factual conditions of another legal regulation in the respective legal context are fulfilled by the bullying. A legal concept of bullying does not exist in all existing legal regulations of Germany.