The high-profile suicide of Megan Meier has taken a sad political turn, as officials in her hometown attempt to transform grieving into governance -
City officials unanimously passed a measure Wednesday making online harassment a crime, days after learning that a 13-year-old girl killed herself last year after receiving cruel messages on the Internet.
The six-member Board of Aldermen made Internet harassment a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail. Mayor Pam Fogarty said the city had proposed the measure after learning about Megan Meier’s death.
“It is our hope that by supporting one of our own in Dardenne Prairie, we can do our part to ensure this type of harassing behavior never happens again, anywhere,” Fogarty said, adding, “after all, harassment is harassment regardless of the mechanism or tool.”
Several dozen people broke into applause after the measure was passed.
It’s time to inject some sanity into this hoopla. What happened to Megan was tragic but the “insults†she endured online were far from the worst abuse that floats around even on a standard political chat board.
More importantly, virtually no child doesn’t know what (s)he’s getting into when signing up for MySpace or other social networking services. With few exceptions, people join these sites to put their business in public view – typically referred to as “attention whoring†on chat boards. The copious clubbing pictures, artistic dedication, sad poetry, and vanity user groups are all a way of saying “look at me – embrace me!â€. This interaction is no different from real world EXCEPT that it is easier to dupe someone via fake personas.
Should impersonation in itself be crime? It already is in some instances (particularly when dealing with business matters) but the enforcement of such a law wouldn’t have made any difference for Megan Meier. According to news sources, she hung herself moments after being rejected – still under the assumption that “Josh Evans†was a real person. The obvious question is “what’s stopping this from happening in real life?â€. Back in the traditional FaceLife world, boys and girls both have long sought pleasure leading on “inferior†members of the opposite sex, with the singular goal of shooting them down as meanly and publicly as possible. Unfortunate victims of these public attacks suffer considerable short term embarrassment and perhaps some longer-term confidence issues, but the overwhelming majority do not commit suicide. The proportion of victims who kill themselves after enduring similar ribbing on an impersonal medium susceptible to impersonations is likely smaller.
Dardene Prairie officials freely admit that their feel-good law is not enforceable anywhere outside city borders. The 2000 US Census lists the town’s population as barely over 4,000 so internet users at large have little to fear … or do we? Nothing guarantees the passage of hysteria-induced legislature quite like a sympathetic-looking teenage girl whose life was ended pre-maturely by evil outside forces. Since news outlets tend to report these types of stories in clusters to create the impression of an epidemic (e.g. the string of “noose†incidents reported after the original Jena incident), several more net-inspired suicides will likely come to light. The resulting hysteria will of course sell more newspapers and could -more dangerously- result in more feel-good legislation on the city, state/province or national level.
But who’s going to decide what constitutes cruelty? How does one user know what another user can put up with? Is photo-shopping a picture cruel? How about catching someone in a lie and reporting it online? How will the law address issues of impersonation? One stolen password could jail the owner of a popular internet persona.
Popular culture and media may forever to serve as a scapegoat every time tragedy strikes a valued member of society and those who sat by idly seek to redirect their guilt. Most of these attacks will be narrowly-focused and forgettable but some, if not checked, could lead to serious attacks on our freedom of expression. The Megan Meier case was saddening, but exacting political revenge on the dog-eat-dog aspect of social networking will not prevent the next depressed teen from voluntarily leaving this earth.
In fact, I hope they sue for wrongful death. They should.
From what I’ve seen, the net is already on the case
Blue Merle vs Lori Drew
All I’m saying is let’s not make this situation out to be more than it is. There are enough unstable people in this world and we can’t coddle them all at the expense of the majority.
Does this new law provide any justice for Megan? Does this law provide equitable relief for a future victim or actually weaken the current law?
I reject the premise of this new law and believe it completely misses the mark. The reasoning behind this opinion is that city officials have consistently treated this case as an Internet harassment case instead of a child welfare/exploitation case.
Classifying this case a harassment issue completely fails to address the most serious aspects of the methods Lori Drew employed to lead this youth to her demise. The Vice disagrees that harassment was even a factor in this case until just a couple of days before Megan’s death.
Considering this case a harassment issue is incorrect because during the 5 weeks Lori Drew baited and groomed her victim, the attention was NOT unwanted attention. It was not harassment at all. It was invited attention. Megan participated in the conversations willingly because she was lured, manipulated and exploited without her knowledge.
This law willfully sets a precedent that future child exploiters and predators can use to reclassify their cases to harassment issues. In effect, the law enacted to give Megan justice, may make her even more vulnerable. So long as the child victim doesn’t tell the predator to stop, even a harassment charge may not stick with the right circumstances and a good defender.
Every aspect of this case follows the same procedural requirement used to convict a Child Predator. A child was manipulated by an adult. A child was engaged in sexually explicit conversation (as acknowledged by Lori Drew herself). An adult imposed her will on a child by misleading her, using a profile designed to sexually or intimately attract the 13 year old Megan.
Lori then utilized the power she had gained over this child to cause significant distress and endangerment to that child. She even stipulated to many of these activities in the police report she filed shortly after Megan’s death.
We can go on and on here, but the parallels between this case and many other child predator cases that are successfully prosecuted bear striking similarities.
Child Predator laws do not require much more than simply proving that an adult has engaged a minor in sexually explicit conversation. Lori Drew has already stipulated that her conversations with Megan were sometimes sexual for a child Megan’s age.
City officials who continue to ignore this viable, documented admission and continue to address this issue as harassment are intentionally burying their heads in the sand, when the solution is staring them right in the face. Why?
On June 5th, 2006, Governor Matt Blunt signed into law stiff penalties for convicted sex offenders. The Vice believes that officials continually reject a child predator classification of this case in order to keep the penalty of this offense out of this harsher realm.
Opponents of this law are active in defeating this law not by changing it, but by disqualifying cases like Megan’s from ever being heard.
There are several other child exploitation laws on the books. To date, none of them have even been considered by City, State and Federal officials in this case. I’m outraged that a motion was never even filed, so that the case could at least be argued before a judge or jury.
Those satisfied with this response out of Missouri officials need to think through the effect this law will truly have. It quite honestly has the potential to directly undermine Jessica’s law. It quiet easily gives prosecutors a way out of prosecuting child endangerment and child predator cases in the future.
Beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing here.
Danny Vice
http://weeklyvice.blogspot.com
But more disturbing than that are the actions of authorities: If it had been an adult MALE that “carried on” in a sexually explicit way with a 13 year old girl (even if it WERE for the purposes of revenge for his teen daughter) he’d be locked up as a pedophile.
Second, there are al-READY laws on the books that cover this type of harassment. For chrissake: just implement them!
What is particularly chilling to me, is that Lori Drew knew that the victim was known to be suicidal in the past. That means that her statement to her that the “world would be better off without you” or whatever it was… is even MORE chilling: it means she was TRYING to steer this girl to suicide. It means she had a desire to push it in that direction, and did so.
Reminds me of Charles Manson. He never “technically” put his own hands upon his victims either, but he “made it happen” by manipulating people, I mean that’s the premise upon which he was convicted: that he had INCITED it.
Same thing here. Lori Drew incited this suicide and should be just as responsible as Manson was when he incited those murders—and she should also be treated just like any other adult who engages in online relationships of a sexual nature with under-aged children.