If Online Harassment Is Harassment... Why Does It Need A Special Law?
from the questions-without-answers dept
There was a tragic story a few weeks ago that I'm sure many of you read about. It involved a teenager who committed suicide after a "boy" she had become friendly with over MySpace stopped talking to her and said he had heard bad things about her. It later came out that the "boy" never existed -- and was actually a former friend in the neighborhood and the friend's mother effectively toying with the girl. There wasn't much to say about the tragedy, though I was wondering how long it would take for people to start blaming online communities or MySpace for such things. That hasn't happened yet, but the town where this happened has now passed a law banning online harassment, with the mayor saying: "After all, harassment is harassment, regardless of the mechanism or tool." That may be true -- but if it is, why isn't anyone asking why there needs to be a separate law for online harassment, if it's already considered harassment? Yes, the situation is tragic, but why the focus on online harassment rather than harassment in general?
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Filed Under: harassment, online harassment
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Politicians write laws, thats what they do. I just wish they would push for enforcement for the ones we already have.
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Re: your comment about hate crimes
Again, hate crimes are a distinction of the motivation. Law against murder (or harassment) or not, you can often get sympathy from a judge or the court if your situation is the slightest bit understandable. The distinction of "hate crime" is purely the legal system recognizing there is absolutely no sympathy due the perpetrator (if proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt).
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Re: Re: your comment about hate crimes
Murder is murder. Harassment is harassment. Laws ought to punish action, not motivation.
As to this silly online harassment law, this is the same thing as making cell phone use while driving illegal while it is perfectly legal to eat a cheeseburger, drink your coffee, change the radio station, and yell at your kids in the back seat. Distraction is distraction. Why differentiate?
Someone said it best above: the job of a politician is to make laws so they do, however silly they are.
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Two Points
2) There is a difference between "outlawing online harassment" and "legally defining harassment to include online harassment" and if the law simply adds online harassment, then it's probably not bad - if it makes it a whole new crime then hopefully it's not like so many other instances where they've taken something that's been illegal for years and slapped "internet/online" onto it added new fines that are more up-to-date, so that if you commit the offline version of the crime you pay a $50 fine but if it's done online with the new law in place, it's suddenly a $50,000 fine.
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Couldn't agree with you more.
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Gives them something to do, I guess
Given that, the on-line world allows the in-curious user a degree of anonymity/pseudonymity. Because the user's face/voice was hidden, in this case, because the user was able to hide behind a screen-name, the victim had no sign that the person she was talking to was not the actual person pictured in her mind.
She believed she was talking to a real boy. There is no law that says you must always represent yourself on-line as the person you are off-line. This would hinder such things are role-play. Although the criminal possibilities are evident (as shown by this case), there is still a very high value placed on pseudonymity, in general, when it comes to internet message boards, comments, etc.
The parents can pursue an intentional infliction of emotional distress or wrongful death action. Should the legislature get involved? Only if this activity is not covered by existing law.
I think it's enough that there are laws against "harassment" and uniform enforcement of those laws will serve to deter these types of incidents. If the law is not enforced, or is enforced in a discriminatory manner, then fewer people will obey the law. Simple risk-reward calculation.
There used to be a time when "internet" crimes were prosecuted under federal wire fraud-types of statutes. It'd be a shame to create a whole new crime which could "only happen on the Internet."
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Short Answer????
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I feel public shaming of this woman her husband and their daughter are in order for the rest of their lives. I aslo believe all tubes from this family should be cut and or tied. I am STFU and GBTW
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sausage
Unfortunately, until we start electing people to office who actually want to do their job and are intelligent, its better just to ignore and laugh at these sorts of things...
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What does their current law say?
Many harassment laws are only modern enough to define telephone calls and late night ring-&-hangups as harassment that can be performed without being face to face. A good defense lawyer would be saying, "My client did not meet the plaintiff personally, nor make any phone calls. Therefore she is innocent of harassment."
This town might be overreacting, but without reading their harassment law it is not possible to say they don't need to modernize it.
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Always will be Suicides
Hate crimes? Yea, the person who committed the crime probably hated the person he murdered or assaulted.
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My Opinion is:
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Re: My Opinion
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Civil action much?
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Re: Civil Action
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Now justice is hard to find I admit. Think of this. A woman pedophile gets a suspended sentence, 2 years in jail, probation : a man gets 8 to 15 years in federal prison for the same crime. Was the womans motive more pure? More loving ?
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That said, online harassment IS NOTHING LIKE REAL LIFE HARASSMENT. For one thing, if you're walking home from school and are jumped by some high school kids who ridicule you, physically shove you around, insult you and embarrass you -- there is no OFF button.
Second, what comes next - if I'm a fat person and there are some people online talking about how all fat people should die and are worthless and their presence in public make them simply want to puke and it makes me feel really bad, should I be able to charge them with harassment? Or is this only going to apply to pretty white girls and people with alternate sexualities?
Third, if rather than reducing the entire internet to a level of conversation that would not hurt or offend a twelve year old girl, how about the parents grow the hell up and monitor their child? Especially if they KNOW she is susceptible to depression and ridicule, which was the entire reason the PARENTS encouraged her to set up a myspace account in the first place!
And finally - if we're going to criminalize "online" harassment, then we should criminalize parents not talking to their children and sloughing them off when they're "feeling bad".
You see, as much as I fucking detest the people who emotionally tortured this girl over the internet, from the safety of their family home down the street - her own parents would absolutely be found somewhat culpable in civil court (since civil court basis findings and judgments on degree of responsibility).
While the other family is significantly responsible for what happened to her and their intentions were vicious and inhuman - the fact is that this girl's parents set her up with a myspace account, knew she had some emotional issues, was taking medications and then when she came to her parents for help because she felt she had been kicked in the gut by "a boy who really liked her and then turned on her", instead of pausing and addressing the problem, her mother yelled at her - because she "was upset at her for some of the language she was using on line".
If the parents had given her some degree of attention. Perhaps for even five minutes, when she was coming to them with her heart on her sleeve that day, she might not have gone up to her bedroom and hung herself a few minutes later.
Now, the other thing I want to bring up is -- why is the mother down the street not being brought up on sex crime charges? An ADULT was pretending to be A CHILD in order to flirt with A CHILD. If a man did that, he'd end up on "to catch a predator" and be run out of town. How is it that it's okay for this woman to do that -- and even worse, do that to the end of emotional torture and coaxing the girl to suicide?
I also wonder if this entire thing would come out differently if it wasn't a "mother" doing this but some guy. If it was a guy, he would be "a monster" and they'd be suggesting that he gets some weird sexual thrill out of convincing a girl to kill herself.
Oh, also -- wasn't there someone who was charged for ENCOURAGING someone to kill themselves via a chat room awhile back -- resulting in the "victim" killing themselves?
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Need for Updated Laws
It's fair to say that cooking up new laws that are purely reactionary and address very narrow and specific behaviors is not good policy. However, neither is fitting new behaviors into existing law whose drafters never contemplated such a development. In the end, it is much better to create new laws to handle new behaviors, but only so long as they are the result of thorough research and thinking. The concept of writing laws for harmful online behavior is sound, the question comes down to the execution of the drafting and application.
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well the law was passed
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Crimal intent
When people are suicidal they lack a functional support structure in their life. The persona is quoted saying "the world would be better without her", which is quite damning. It is incriminating, as it expresses intent to persuade Megan to kill herself.
If Lori had created the Josh Evans persona and casually interacted with Megan as a friend. That is simple roleplay. However, she created the persona purposely for deceiving Megan. At the very lease this should fall under the child protection laws. However, taking it to the next level of telling Megan to kill herself leaves no uncertainty as to Lori's intent. Lori may not have put the belt around Megan's neck, but she sure helped kick the chair out from under her. While the fight that Megan had with her mother was the final straw, it's obvious that if Megan had not been steered towards suicide by Lori Drew, she probably would be alive today.
Creation of the online harassment law just demonstrates how out of touch politicians are with reality. This wasn't a minor issue of harassment, it was manipulation that ended in death.
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Please send help
Too much lead/mercury content in the aquifer? Inbreeding?
wow.
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Re: Please send help
It's always these "emo" kids that do stupid things on online communities like Myspace that always get civil issues involved. Yes, I think that it was a terrible thing for the participants to do to the girl. I especially think that it is juvenile and ridiculous of the mother to do it, because.... well they're an adult.
But, for them to be criminally charge that girl and her mother for what they did isn't right because they didn't force that girl to commit suicide. Let's just say... that the boy was actually real and he was doing all the talking to the girl that committed suicide. Would they charge him for harassment? Maybe these things he heard were true?
My $0.02.
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New Law - You must be 18+ to use the internet.
I love how no mention of the girl's criminally negligent and worthless parents. If she was that mentally unstable why wasn't she being treated. The simple fact that she had unmonitored internet access alone seals the negligence assessment in my opinion.
I think a nice simple law to put the responsibility back were it belongs is in order. No unmonitored access to the internet for children.
BTW "Hate crimes" like "free market" as well as "excited delirium" are make believe nonsense terms like "tooth fairy" or "boogeyman" if you find yourself using them check your keyboard for drool.
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suicide
I do get tired of hearing about bad things happening concerning myspace all the time!But it's not myspaces fault!I love myspace!It's some people trying to give it a bad name by doing their mean or horrid stuff!
All I can say is keep myspace,but throw away the bad guy's,and gal's!
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Responses
Did you read the story? Megan was on meds and her parents did monitor her internet use. However she was a teen and as such had the liberty of not having her parent gawking over her shoulder 24/7. While it was irresponsible for her mother to have an argument while knowing her daughter's instability, the parents are not the ones to blame. If the parents drove Megan to suicide then yes, they deserve your incrimination. In this case though, they contributed but did not instigate Megan's demise.
#27, death is a serious issue...obviously you lack the maturity to grasp such reasoning.
#28, you're absolutely right. MySpace is simply a tool, it should not be held responsible for what users do with it. It's akin to saying that music and video games instigate teen suicide. Pure rubbish.
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