Quote:
Originally Posted by garinda
The laws relating to this area are wide-ranging, and penalties can include imprisonment. Some of the major pieces of legislation are: - The Malicious Communications Act 1988, which lists offences relating to sending indecent, offensive or threatening letters, electronic communications or articles with the intention of causing distress or anxiety to those receiving them.
- The Protection From Harassment Act 1997, under which a person must not pursue a course of conduct
(a) which amounts to harassment of another person, and
(b) which he/she knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of another person.
In a similar way is also an offence for someone to pursue a course of conduct which they know or ought to know will make someone afraid that violence will be used against them.
- The Telecommunications Act of 1984, which states that a person who:
(a) “sends, by means of a public telecommunications system, a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character;
or
(b) sends by those means, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, a message that he knows to be false or persistently makes use for that purpose of a telecommunications system,”
is guilty of an offence
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Would the receiver of the calls not be the one who has to say this is indeed what they perceived the phone calls to be?
I imagine that it takes more than 4 or 5 phone calls as well otherwise we'd all be reporting telesales people for this harassment.
If the law was applied in black and white we'd just feed all the facts into a computer and see whether someone was guilty or not. Unfortunately for everyone but those in the legal profession, it doesn't work like that.
Courts would let them off lightly and it wouldn't be worth the expense.