A bill that would make doxxing a crime and not just grounds to file a lawsuit sailed over a key hurdle Thursday at the Oregon Legislature.

Senate Bill 1121 passed by a unanimous vote of 29-0 on the Senate floor. It would make it a crime for people to encourage the harassment, injury or stalking of victims by publicly sharing their home addresses, personal email addresses, personal phone numbers, Social Security numbers, contact information for family members, photographs of the victims’ children or name of the children’s schools, among other information.

“This is an important step to keep our kids safer, to keep our communities safer from the epidemic of doxxing,” said Sen. Anthony Broadman, a Bend Democrat, in a speech on the Senate floor.

Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, a Democrat from Corvallis, said earlier this month during a committee meeting that the doxxing law might apply to someone on a college campus sharing an alleged sexual assault victim’s private contact information and urging members of a fraternity to harass that person. Or conversely, Gelser Blouin said, she imagines it could apply to supporters of an alleged sexual assault victim encouraging other people to harass a college student accused of sexual assault.

Sen. Mike McLane, an Eastern Oregon Republican, said he didn’t like a provision in the bill that would outlaw the sharing of a victim’s personal emails because a victim could simply ignore, delete or block such emails. But he said he was voting for the bill to address “this divided, volatile culture that we’re living in now” where people behave “in such repugnant ways.”

Sen. Kim Thatcher, a Republican from Keizer, said she doesn’t want to suppress free speech, but the bill defines “harass” as causing “severe emotional distress” that might even result in a “mental health diagnosis” and “is protracted rather than merely trivial or transito