Phone Harassment:

The penal code defines phone harassment as being:

Obscene or Threatening, or Annoying (repeated phone calls to victim’s residence with intent to annoy.) or Annoying (repeated phone calls to victim’s work place with intent to annoy.) The above excludes calls made in good faith.

Just as you read in the text on vandalism, there are different kinds of phone harassment.

Kiddy crime prank calls:

A kid calls a store and says “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” Store employee replies “We sure do”. Kid replies “Why don’t you let him out” and hangs up all proud of himself because he just pulled off the crime of the century! (I may have done this once or twice when I was a kid but I can’t remember back that far.)

The kid gets a little older, develops an interest in girls, and starts making anonymous calls to girls in his class that he has a crush on. Or he calls to make an anonymous threat, against someone he got into a beef with at school. Or a couple kids getting together after school and making random phone calls out of the phone book. We get lots of these calls from the parents of high school students, complaining about prank calls and hang up calls. You have 3 things on your side.

· Phone recorders.

· *69 which recently became available.

· And boredom.

Most kids and many adults making random prank phone calls get bored quickly if they reach an answering machine. What fun is that unless you can “hear” the person getting annoyed on the other end.

Remember what my favorite saying is. Every Action causes a Reaction. The person making these calls, whether it’s a kid or an adult, are looking for a reaction from their actions. Take away the opportunity, you eliminate the problem.

If you start to get a series of hang up or prank calls, don’t sit on the phone and ask hello 20 times. For whatever reason, callers seem to get great pleasure from this. If you answer the phone and no one is there, hang up. If it was a legitimate call, they’ll call back. If hang up calls continue then that’s the time to turn on the answering machine and let the machine deal with it. 9 times out of 10 the caller will get bored and pick on someone else, or give up all together. If the calls persist then turn off the ringer so that you will not be disturbed.