On October 17th, 2006, a young girl named Megan Meier from Dardenne Prairie Missouri tragically committed suicide after being a victim of cyber-bullying. She was just thirteen years old. Meier was overall your typical young teenage girl. She participated in a number of activities including swimming, boating, and volleyball, and seemed to have a fairly normal social life with friends. She had been diagnosed with ADD and depression, but her friends and parents stated that Megan was a “goofy, bubbly girl who enjoyed spending time with her friends and family.” Like every teenage girl, Megan was into boys, and was somewhat unhappy with her overall body image. Megan decided to open a MySpace account in an attempt to communicate with her current circle of friends, but also reach out and meet new friends, and particularly boys. (Fox News online)
Shortly after opening her MySpace account, Megan received a message from someone claiming to be a 16 year old boy named “Josh Evans”. She and “Josh” soon became online friends, but never met in person. Megan told her friends she thought he was quote “attractive”. She began exchanging messages with “Josh” on a regular basis and her friends and family reported that “her spirits were lifted and she looked happy”. This person claimed to have just moved to the area, was home schooled, and didn’t have a phone yet. On October 15th, 2006 however, the tone of the messages had changed. “Evans” was no longer being nice and sweet to her as he had been in his previous messages. In fact, he began being extremely hateful to her, telling her that he didn’t want to be friends with her because he had heard she wasn’t very nice to her friends, telling her she was ugly, and even went so far as to post mean and hateful bulletins and blogs about her. The last message that “Josh Evans” sent to Megan Meier said quote “The world would be a better place without you.” Two days later, Megan hung herself in the closet doorway of her bedroom. (Fox News) The pain and humiliation had obviously become too much for her to handle.
When police investigated Megan’s suicide, they came across her MySpace page and were able to pull up messages between her and “Josh Evans”. After careful investigation, it was discovered that “Josh Evans” did not even exist, but was in fact created by a cyber-bully, Lori Drew, who happened to be the mother of one of Megan’s friends. Drew claimed that she had created the account to see if Megan had been talking badly about her daughter, and that it was never supposed to have “gone this far”. A federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew on May 15th, 2008 on three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress, and one count of criminal conspiracy. If convicted, Lori Drew could be facing up to 20 years in prison. (Fox News online and the Oprah Winfrey Show)
While Megan’s case is on the more extreme side of the harmful effects of cyber-bullying, there are many other harmful effects experienced by teens and pre-teens who have been victimized by cyber-bullies. Research has demonstrated a number of serious consequences of cyber-bullying victimization. For example, victims have lower self-esteem, increased suicidal ideation, and a variety of emotional responses such as cyber-bullying others, being scared, frustrated, angry, and depressed. One of the most damaging psychological effects is the withdrawal from family and friends, which is often times the cyber-bully’s intent. (Wikipedia)
To investigate this a little further, I spoke with my little brother, a fourteen year old freshmen at Gibault Catholic High School in Waterloo Illinois, to get his perspective and see if he knew of any instances of cyber-bullying occurring within his high school. His response was quite disturbing. He told of a story similar to the article in which this paper is based on, called “You wanna take this online?” In the article, it discusses how an anonymous cyber-bully posted a “ho list” and put several girls from the school’s names on it along with information regarding their sexual activity, some true, and some extremely fabricated. My brother told me that this happened at his school, only instead of being sent to just the girls it pertained to, it was sent out as a mass email to kids in many different schools across St. Clair and Monroe counties. The “ho list” was discovered and shut down when a teacher in the computer lab of another school discovered some of her sophomore students viewing the list online and snickering about who they knew and the comments that were made.
He also told me that a sophomore girl at his high school had sent naked, sexual pictures to her boyfriend whom she had been dating for almost 2 years. Shortly after they broke up, he took all the pictures she had sent to him and created a porno website of her, posting the pictures and sending the link out to all of his friends, who forwarded it on to all of their friends. The girl was devastated, and shortly after, she and her family packed up and moved because the humiliation was so great. My brother Kelly told me that he had heard about the porn site, but that out of respect for the girl, he and some of his friends chose not to view it.
As I stated before, cyber-bullying is a growing trend. The National Crime Prevention Council reports cyber-bullying is a problem that affects almost half of all American teens. (I-Safe.Org) In 2007, Debbie Heimowitz, a Stanford University Master’s student created “Adina’s Deck”, a film based on Stanford accredited research. She worked in focus groups for ten weeks in three different schools to learn about the problem of cyber-bullying in Northern California. The findings determined that over 60% of students had been cyber-bullied and were victims of cyber-bullying. While these statistics only speak for a few schools in Northern California, in 2006, ABC News reported on a study conducted in 2004 by I-Safe.Org that was nationwide and the results are alarming!
The Statistics are as follows:
• 42% of kids have been bullied while online. One in four has had it happen more than once.
• 35% of kids have been threatened online. Nearly one in five had had it happen more than once.
• 21% of kids have received mean or threatening e-mails or other messages.
• 58% of kids admit someone has said mean or hurtful things to them online. More than four out ten say it has happened more than once.
• 58% have not told their parents or an adult about something mean or hurtful that happened to them online.
***A more recent study in 2006 conducted by Harris Interactive concluded that 43% of U.S. teens had experienced some form of cyber-bullying in the past year. (I-Safe.Org)
Unfortunately, unlike physical bullying, electronic bullies remain virtually anonymous using temporary email accounts, pseudonyms in chat rooms, instant messaging programs, cell phone texting, and other internet venues to mask their identity. (Wikipedia) This perhaps frees them from normal and social constraints on their behavior. Furthermore, cyber-bullies might be emboldened when using electronic means to carry out their antagonistic agenda because it takes less energy and courage to express hurtful comments using a keypad or a keyboard than with one’s voice. We as adults and parents have a responsibility to protect our children from being harassed and ridiculed, and teach them not to be bullies themselves; but how do you protect them when they won’t tell you what’s going on, and these “cyber-bullies” are so easily made untraceable? The answer isn’t simple and it isn’t complete. You can’t possibly prevent it from happening ALL the time; but what we CAN do is to talk to our children and educate them. Ask questions, check their text messages, their MySpace and facebook pages, and overall be INVOLVED in what’s going on in your child’s life. Some say it’s going overboard, being nosy, and “invading their privacy”, but with all of this going on and the number of cases of cyber-bullying on the rise, can you afford NOT to be?! The choice could mean the difference between life and death for your child or someone else’s.