Turn About is Fair Play
Posted by: tony on 11/28/2007 12:28 AM
Updated by: tony on 11/28/2007 12:30 AM
Expires: 12/29/2007 12:00 AM
As a Christian, one is supposed to advocate turning the other cheek, but some cases just cry out for retribution in kind.
When we first moved into the house in which we are living, my daughter struck up a friendship with a neighbor girl. This girl was pretty, petite, popular, and evil to the core.
Thay had an on-again, off-again friendship, and during one of on-again periods (I assume), my daughter was IMing with "the devil's daughter", and she was trying to hook my daughter into a negative conversation about another girl. My daughter took the bait, and to her horror, found out that this other girl was sitting behind "the devil's daughter" at her house watching the screen.
This led to a discussion with both of my girls about the evils of gossip, and if my daughters refused to talk about others negatively behind their back, this sort of thing would never happen.
"The devil's daughter" then started a spree of online harassment using screen names for which she had hacked the passwords. These were screen names my daugher knew and trusted. The screen names were saying hateful things that my daughter assumed came from the people she knew owned the names.
My next lesson was: "On the internet, nobody is as they seem. If they are talking out of character, they might be an entirely different person.".
What this little "unspayed female dog" didn't realize was that I was experienced in internet forensics. I tied all of the screen names to the same IP address using the IM TCP connections, and turned this girl into AOL for violation of her AUP (acceptable use policy).
This was my first experience with cyber bullying.
A current case that mirrors it is the case of Megan Meier. She was a 13 year old girl who hanged herself in her closet after being spurned by a boy online that she had met 6 weeks prior and with whom she had struck up a friendship.
The Meier suicide occurred in October 2006, but it did not become widely known until last Sunday when the Suburban Journals newspapers, which cover the St. Louis suburbs, published a lengthy article detailing the hoax involving a fictitious 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, who contacted Megan on MySpace.com.
Their communication lasted six weeks, according to the Journal article, and ended with a string of disturbing messages from Josh and postings that read Megan was "fat" and "a slut."
The story reported Ron Meier, Megan's father, saying the final posting on the MySpace account read "The world would be a better place without you."
Late on the afternoon of Oct. 16, 2006, Ron and Tina Meier discovered Megan had hanged herself in her closet. Megan, who died the following day, was a few weeks shy of her 14th birthday.
The story gets worse.
The death of Megan Meier in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., went beyond the growing phenomenon of cyber-bullying because the alleged instigators of the hoax were not only adults, but parents of a classmate of Megan's, who lived just down the street from her. [ed.- to be fair, it was the wife, with some help from an employee from her business]
It was an adult who behaved like "the devil's daughter" who was 14 at the time.
Megan's parents discovered that they could not prosecute the mother of a friend with whom Megan decided to end a friendship. The papers who reported this story decided not to divulge the names of the perpetrators to protect the anonymity of their teenaged daughter.
This community's patience has dried up. The furious neighbors -- and in the wake of recent media reports, an outraged public -- are taking matters into their own hands.
In an outburst of virtual vigilantism, readers of blogs such as RottenNeighbor.com and hitsusa.com have posted the Drews' home address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and photographs.
Dozens of people allegedly have called local businesses that work with the family's advertising booklet firm, and flooded the phone lines this week at the local Burlington Coat Factory, where Curt Drew reportedly works.
"I posted that, where Curt works. I'm not ashamed to admit that," said Trever Buckles, 40, a neighbor whose two teenage boys grew up with Megan. "Why? Because there's never been any sense of remorse or public apology from the Drews, no 'maybe we made a mistake.' "
Local teenagers and residents protest just steps from the Drews' tiny porch. A fake 911 call, claiming a man had been shot inside the Drew home, sent law enforcement officers to surround the one-story, white-sided house. People drive through the neighborhood in the middle of the night, screaming, "Murderer!"
The Drews, who have mounted cameras and recording devices onto the roof of their house to track the movements of their neighbors, declined to comment for this article.
My, this is a rough one. Random anonymous people threatening and ganging up on you. You'll learn how to deal with it. Hopefully better than Megan did.
