Six cyberbullying victims reached police

A 13-year-old was among six alleged cyberbullying victims identified by police in 2026, according to figures tabled in parliament and reported by Times of Malta.

The numbers were given by Home Affairs Minister Glenn Bedingfield in reply to a parliamentary question from Labour MP Romilda Zarb, who asked how many cases had been reported since cyberbullying was introduced as an offence in the Criminal Code, with an age and gender breakdown.

Six police-identified victims in a year is a small number only if one forgets what the number is measuring. It is not a count of cyberbullying in Malta. It is a count of cases that reached police and were recorded as such.

That gap matters because the same parliamentary reply points to a much larger stream elsewhere in the system. Between 2020 and 2025, 168 cases were reported to the Anti-Bullying Service. The highest totals in that period were 37 cases in 2020 and 37 again in 2025. The lowest was 16 in 2022.

Those figures are not directly comparable to the six identified by police in 2026. They come from a different service and cover different years. But they do show the obvious institutional problem: the state has more than one door for the same harm, and the numbers do not travel neatly between them.

The parliamentary reply also appears to acknowledge that the anti-bullying totals may still undercount the problem. Some incidents may have been reported straight to police or handled internally by schools, meaning no single figure captures the whole picture.

Another break in the data arrived in 2022, when Church schools stopped submitting cyberbullying reports to the state’s Anti-Bullying Service. Such cases have since been referred to services set up by the Church Schools Secretariat. That is an administrative change, but it also makes the national picture harder to read. When reporting lines split, so does accountability.

The verified news here is narrow: parliament now has a police figure for 2026, and that figure includes a child aged 13. The broader point is less comfortable. Malta has criminalised cyberbullying, set up reporting channels and produced statistics, but still does not seem to have one complete ledger of how often children and others are being targeted, where cases are ending up, or which authority is actually carrying the load.

A law can create an offence. It does not, by itself, create a coherent record.