This week, the parents of a teen from my area blamed MySpace for their 13-year-old daughter’s suicide. They are pushing to have local and state laws expanded to cover online harassment.
The most disturbing piece of this story for me is that a parent — a mother — used social media to manipulate and bully a child with devastating effects. I’m very familiar with how cruel adolescent girls can be to each other, but I’m stunned that an adult was behind it. The Internet community seems to feel the same way.
In an onslaught of internet shaming, online users quickly outed the woman behind the MySpace fake. Bloggers revealed the name of the woman’s business and Yelpers from around the country bashed the business in scathing reviews. The woman’s home address, phone number and satellite photos of her phone have been published. Locally, the woman behind the incident and her family are being subjected to threats, pranks and bricks through their windows.
Unfortunately, there is enough drama and bullying going on in my own neighborhood that this entire incident does not seem far fetched. Bullying in many forms seems to be rampant among girls. My suburban neighborhood has a large pack of girls ranging from ages 7 to 13. (We either don’t have a noticeable number of boys, or they are in hiding). The group is connected online as well as offline. Skirmishes move quickly from the front yard to email flame wars. Daily worry about my daughter’s social angst and self esteem is giving me gray hair.
The National Association of School Psychologists defines relational aggression as “a type of bullying primarily used by pre-adolescent and adolescent girls to victimize other girls—a covert use of relationships as weapons to inflict emotional pain.” Are social networks are a more effective foil for those jabs? Is bullying more likely when it can be done at a safe distance or anonymously behind a computer screen?
Tags: myspace suicide, online bullying, relational aggression, social networking, Social Networks, teen
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