What is the legal procedure I can follow if I found out that my daughter is undergoing cyberbullying through social media, and someone is using her picture to blackmail her?

You can give a written information with all pieces of  evidence you have collected to support your complaint, to your nearest police station which deals with cyber crimes and ask them to register a case and investigate the matter to punish the culprit.

I agree with the rest of the answers

The sad reality is that all our efforts are being thwarted by the growing popularity of social media, the proliferation of social media websites, and the access teens have to more Internet-connected devices. The most recent story making the rounds on cable news and the Internet is Rebecca Sedwick, of Lakeland, Fla., who jumped from a cement factory tower on September 9th, 2013.

While only two girls were arrested for bullying, which allegedly caused Sedwick to commit suicide, authorities claim that Rebecca was "terrorized" relentlessly for months by as many as 15 girls, both physically and online. One message posted to Rebecca's profile on social networks said that she should "drink bleach and die.'' Rebecca's mother closed her Facebook account and moved Rebecca to another school but thanks to social media the cyberbulling continued.

In an unrelated case, a girl with special needs in Texas is being bullied mercilessly by her classmates via text messages. Shea Shawhan, 18, a junior at Plano West Senior High School, suffers from seizures due to a brain injury she suffered birth. Despite her seizures, Shea participates in sports and is a member of the school's cheerleading squad. Instead of being inspired by -- and celebrating the achievements of -- Shea, her school mates are bullying her instead.

From one of the texts:

"Shea should just have one of her fucking seizures and die because people at west don't want her. That's the reason she has seizures, because that's karma for giving birth to a freaky slut."

Keri Riddell, Shea's mother, noticed the texts and reported the situation to the police. In addition, she accompanies her daughter during free periods at school to prevent any physical abuse from occurring. Riddell changed her daughter's cell number but the texts are still coming in to her new number.

Social Media and Cyberbullying and Technology Exacerbating the Issue

For every step forward we take in raising awareness of the negative effects of bullying in our schools, bullies seem to find more channels by which to terrorize their peers and more hatred to motivate them. Can they be stopped?

In the two cases listed above, the parents of the teens being bullied took extraordinary steps such as closing a Facebook account, changing phone numbers, physically accompanying their children during school hours, and changing schools. Yet, in both cases, as with so many other similar stories across America, the bullying continued.

Adding to the problem is the fact that many social networks allow users to create anonymous profiles. How can parents intervene or adequately report bullying while this practice continues? We can close our children's Facebook account but often they've already moved on to newer social platforms such as Ask.fm or Kik Messenger. We must be ever vigilant in protecting our children from bullies but what responsibility do the parents of those doing the bullying have?

Parents' Responsibility

In most cases of cyberbullying, parents reject the accusations that their children could perpetrate such heinous acts. The father of one of the girls accused of bullying Rebecca Sedwick claimed that "none of it is true... my daughter's a good girl and I'm 100 percent sure that whatever they're saying about my daughter is not true," despite the proof the Sheriff claims to possess. While I'm happy to see that Lakeland's sheriff has charged the girls who allegedly bullied Sedwick, what consequences, if any, will their parents face?

What role have the parents of bullies played in these cases? Why are parents giving young children smart phones with 24/7 access to social networks? More importantly, why are they not diligently monitoring their kids' online activity? Pre-teens typically don't have the funds or ability to purchase Internet-enabled devices or authorize Internet and mobile contracts for access to social networks. If parents are going to provide such access to their children, they must be held accountable for their online activities, including cyber-bullying.

How Do We Stop Cyber-Bullying?

We live in a politically correct world where protecting the names and privacy of students is sacred but what about the protection of kids that are being bullied? Should there not be an exception to this rule for social networks and school boards?

Why not:

·         Force parents to take responsibility for the actions of their children on social networks, especially when they enable that access.

·         Criminalize cyber-bullying and enforce steeper penalties for teens who bully others.

·         Mandate that social networks post anti-bullying public service announcements and bullying hotline phone numbers.

·         Require social networks and text-messaging services to install contextual monitoring to discover and report/block bullying comments as they happen.

·         Repeal laws that allow teens to "erase their mistakes."

If we're going to have a zero-tolerance policy on this issue, then let's really have one. We can't be half-assed about it. Teens are committing suicide and we're too often left scratching our heads wondering what could have been done to prevent it.

·         Highlighted Action Steps

·         Outreach and education efforts by social media sites could enhance the anti-bullying efforts of schools and parents by keeping them up-to-date on changing technologies, increasing their awareness of online prevention and intervention strategies, and guiding them on how to promote positive use of social media.

·         Visible online efforts targeting youth are an important strategy to encourage them to make use of online incident reporting mechanisms, intervene as bystanders, and use social media in positive and productive ways.

·         Stronger linkages between parents and schools would provide parents with increased support and technical knowledge to carry out monitoring and rule-setting to reduce negative online interactions taking place outside of school. This type of parent involvement is essential to reducing the incidence of cyberbullying and the burden on schools to respond.

·         Schools would benefit from increased opportunities to share and discuss best practices in schoolbased cyberbullying prevention and intervention. Social media sites could play an important role in organizing and facilitating these forums, as well as identifying strategies to support school-based efforts. To effectively address cyberbullying requires partnerships between parents, schools, and social media sites in which each stakeholder plays an active and visible role. The collaborations recommended above could help not only to reduce cyberbullying incidents but to promote digital citizenship among youth and within educational communities.

It's time to get serious about this issue. What are your thoughts? How do we prevent cyber-bullying through social media?

Sources: promoteprevent and huffingtonpost

This is most important question, which you have asked. As a ethical hacker I have seen lots of incidences which happened in India. There are various laws are for cyber crime in different countries. It depends on the country and law made for cyber crime. 

One think that you have to make sure, it is not necessary that the criminal belongs from your country. It also possible that your daughter connected with those peoples which are from different country and made their profile fake. So, it is very critical to capture these criminals for local police. If someone from same country then it is possible to catch criminal by his IP location or other tools uses by police. So, my suggestion to you and your daughter is to stay away from unknown persons and make your profile privacy strong. Ms. Zain, you should do one thing that take your daughter device in parental control policy, so you can monitor her activities on cyber world, Because cyber world also have the dark side.

You need to protect the access devices using Anti-Threat softwares as a first defensive measure in a industry recommended procedure, so you remove the bad sectors like malwares.

You Need to change the credentials immediately.

Now you need to find a way to collect evidences of the incident and submit it to Cybercrime as per rule of the land.

Following are the actions:

1. To approach Law enforcement agencies Like Police of the country and lodge a complaint and follow it up till logical end.

2.  To approach the portal authorities about the specific complaint against the person/group or organisation and ask them to take action.

3.  Supervise, coach, guide and give moral support to fight it and not be cowed down.

Collect and preserve all the evidence and reach out to a good cyber lawyer.

YES we can find her easily by the source code of that image.by the source code we cand find ip address of that image

• Contact the nearest police station and register a FIR to find out the culprit.
• Contact the social networking site with evidences that support your argument and ask them to remove the specified content.
• Give your daughter all the support and let her understand that their parent will be there for her any situation no matter what.
• Give awareness to your children about the traps in social medias and rise them bold.
• Educate your sons that cyber bullying is a crime, so they won't do the same to other girls. 

You can immediately, contact local law governing authorities and contact the facebook or that particular social media for removal of any explicit content that may be hosted there.

i see that the best way is to negotiate with this person the matter and persuade him that he has to avoid using this way with my daughter and persuade  him if i can meet him face to face, if he refused all the ways that i used i will call the police and forget the matter and ask my daughter to close her account and inform all her friends to write about this person