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MySpace Verdict a Danger To Depressed Kids
Since a jury convicted Lori Drew of three misdemeanors for harassing Megan Meier on MySpace and causing her to commit suicide, most of the debate has focused on the question of whether proper legal procedure was followed in an attempt to punish someone for their obviously evil actions, when it wasn't clear that an actual crime had been committed. Emily Bazelon has argued that the rule of law is too important to convict someone for a crime for what was essentially a violation of the MySpace Terms of Service. Anne Mitchell has argued that the slippery slope is nowhere near as dangerous as the backlash is making it sound, because the doctrine of prosecuting people for violating a site's TOS is almost certainly only going to be used against people who commit horrific acts in the process, as Lori Drew did.
I'm more inclined toward the rule of law argument, but hang on — both sides seem to be assuming that it was a desirable outcome to punish Lori Drew publicly and severely. Hell yes she deserved it, but there is more at stake here. What about the consequences for kids who are current victims of harassment and who hear about the case and the verdict?
When anti-cyber-bullying laws were proposed in response to the original news of Megan Meier's suicide, I argued that the laws would be a terrible idea, especially if the criminal provisions of the law were conditional on the bullying victim harming themselves — because then you've created told victims of harassment: You can have your tormentors publicly vilified and even arrested, but only if you make it look like you tried to injure or kill yourself (and at which you might succeed in the process, intentionally or not).
What would be true of a cyber-bulling law is also true for the pseudo-caselaw created by the verdict. Surely there are other Megan Meiers out there who should not be led to believe that they can ruin their harasser's lives by committing suicide.
Now you might argue that by my reasoning, existing harassment laws which are contingent on the victim showing signs of emotional distress, could lead to the same problem — victims either consciously faking distress, or trying to fake distress so convincingly that they actually harm themselves, or subconsciously absorbing the fact that they can only get justice if they actually show harm. I had actually assumed that existing harassment laws governed only the conduct of the harasser, and did not depend on how the victim felt, but I was wrong — here in Washington State for example, RCW 10.14 states that harassing conduct is conduct that
"shall be such as would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress,
and shall actually cause substantial emotional distress to the petitioner." [emphasis added]
Reading that literally means that no matter how bad the harassment is, you still have to feel distressed in order to have them prosecuted, and the more distressed you "act," the more likely you are to succeed! But hang on — in order for that law to create incentives for victims of harassment to fake distress in order to have their personal enemies prosecuted, they would have to actually know that the law says that. I doubt that most people walking around Washington know the exact wording of the harassment law. More likely, they already realize that if they were to ever try and have someone prosecuted for harassment who didn't actually deserve it, a little tears and shaking would probably influence the judge, whether or not their feelings had any technical relevance under the law. And even if they were to exaggerate the effects of the harassment, all they would have to do would be to claim that they threw up or lost sleep from anxiety — they wouldn't have to show evidence of trying to harm or kill themselves.
On the other hand, everybody has heard about the Lori Drew and Megan Meier case, and it seems likely that the fact that Megan killed herself did contribute to the conviction. (At one point Judge George H. Wu had said that he would probably exclude evidence from the trial that Megan Meier had committed suicide as a result of the harassment, but later changed his mind and did allow it to be mentioned, saying "It's impossible to get a jury that doesn't know.") If Megan Meier had merely lost sleep, or suffered from panic attacks, or cut herself as a result of the harassment she endured from Lori Drew, would Drew have been convicted? Or even arrested?
These perverse incentives — "rewarding" Megan Meier for her suicide by vicariously exacting her revenge on Lori Drew — have been present ever since the wall-to-wall coverage of the case first started. Many news outlets have a policy of not publishing the names of suicide victims, not only to protect the privacy of grieving families but to avoid "rewarding" suicides by giving them the attention they may have wanted. The Associated Press Statement of News Values and Principles does not list any policy against printing the names of suicides. Maybe they should. (They do have a policy against printing the names of sexual assault victims, for example.) But it's a slippery journalistic slope to go down once you start deciding not to publish certain elements of a story, even for what seem to be compelling reasons. For example, take the policy of not publishing the names of alleged rape victims. If the rationale is that the AP doesn't want to cause unfair embarrassment to the alleged victims in case their story is true, why wouldn't the AP also avoid publishing the name of the defendant, to avoid causing them vastly greater unfair embarrassment in case the victim's story is false? So any decision to leave someone's name out of a story can lead to sticky "but-then-what-about" scenarios.
Perhaps the story should not have been covered at all, or anywhere near as much as it was. (I realize I may be contributing to the problem here, but my penance is that I'm calling for less coverage in the future, and I would never be writing about this if the mainstream media hadn't covered it so extensively.) What about all the other people who committed suicide during the same year, also as a result of vicious harassment, but with the only difference being that their suicides did not involve the Internet? Don't they deserve the same justice, and don't their tormentors deserve the same vilification?
Defenders of Internet civil liberties have for years been disgusted with the fact that crimes involving the Internet — from simple identity theft to rape and murder — have always gotten disproportionately more attention than the same or similar crimes committed without the aid of a computer. In the Megan Meier case, the effect of the coverage is even worse: Leading potential suicides to believe that they can have the sympathy they always wanted, and revenge on those they hate, if they kill themselves.
If the rationale is that the AP doesn't want to cause unfair embarrassment to the alleged victims in case their story is true, why wouldn't the AP also avoid publishing the name of the defendant, to avoid causing them vastly greater unfair embarrassment in case the victim's story is false?
Excellent quote. You jest, but take into account this true story: my buddy who was 21 at the time was in a sexual relationship with a 17 year old whose father(who was a Sheriff) allowed it, even inviting my buddy to go on camping trips with them and allowing them their own tent.
After an abortion, the relationship turned sour, and my buddy was arrested shortly afterward for statutory rape. Only his name and the crime he was being charged with appeared in the paper. Bad news given the conservative, small-town lynch-mob environment. Though the charges were dropped after he posted bail, his rep was ruined all because of a petty revenge stunt with connections to law enforcement. The media are ruthless and they value sensation above all else.
Bennett's essay is great all-around as encroaching laws provide greater opportunity for enchroachment and abuse(the DMCA comes to mind), and it's frightening that emotionally unstable teens(aren't all teens emotionally unstable?) will have greater latitude in becoming weapons. It's kind of analagous to suicide bombing - give 'em an incentive, and they'll do it. And in today's absurd world, why wouldn't a depressed or terminally ill person offer their revenge service for hire?
What if Drew had a son who agreed to seduce Megan, and who then told her to kill herself? The onlly difference would have been that if it was in person, there would be no evidence - but there would have been no crime, either.
If so, my friend's Annie's boyfriend is guilty of the same thing. Annie is on Zoloft for clinical depression, and one night when she was in a bad way and talking suicide, he told her everyone would be better off if she did. I wound up taking her to the hospital, where she was admitted to the nut ward.
Contemptable, but is it legal? Lots of contemptable things are legal. BTW that crazy Annie's back with her boyfriend. I hope she gives him the clap.
Free Martian Whores!
This isn't about myspace, or terms of service, or teenage suicide. This is about guilt. Even when it's "only" online, we're still talking to other people. We're communicating. And communications form the basis of relationships and through relationships we can effect changes to a person's mood, behavior, life circumstances, and more. The issue is trust, and how some people abuse trust. And all of our criminal codes come down to this. I'll say it again, it's about trust. So people feel naturally betrayed and angry when trust is violated (even accidentally).
But the law is not about trust. The law is about balancing personal freedoms (which includes the right to mistrust and also to betray trust) with society's so-called "best interests", which is mostly about avoiding and minimizing harm. Anyone can throw up a terms of service, and you can't tell me most of you wouldn't wipe your bottoms with the lot of them. I also think I'd find very few people here that would say that talking is a crime; Even when the matter under discussion is about illegal things (like drugs, or underage sex) -- or things we find morally objectionable. Speech in and of itself is not a crime; Actions are criminal.
Yes, she manipulated the hell out of someone who was vulnerable. But how is that different than commercials on TV, selling us crap we don't need? How is it different than the mormons coming over every sunday to try and convert you? It's not, except for intent. And we all want to punish her, not for violating some TOS crap, but because she violated the trust relationship between a child and adult. "It's all for the children" and we rush in stupidly, blindly, reflexively, to protect them. And that is what happened here. The very thing the justice system is supposed to prevent: Linking emotive thinking to punishment.
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If you pretend that you are being cursed by a witch, the whole village will break out their pitchtorches and burning forks to burn the witch. Get the mob to side with you, and you win, regardless of whether or not the so-called witch was actually guilty of witchcraft.
That's the basic principle in this essay. I'm not saying that I agree with all of the finer points of the essay, but it makes a good argument overall. So far in my short lifespan, I have heard several cases involving harassment which were attempts by the harasser to cover up what they were doing by claiming the victim was the harasser.
Let this be a lesson to anyone... just because someone is looking the other way when seeing you do something doesn't mean that it wasn't illegal or criminal in the first place.
What if a crime didn't happen in the first place but the charges were made and brought to the public? See: Duke Lacrosse Team Scandal.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
and it's well established that a parent cannot consent their child to....
Then who is qualified to judge when a child is ready to do anything? I know what you are trying to say and I agree there should be some base lines, but the person that should be able to help their child determine when they are ready to do something should be their parent....not their peer pressuring boy/girl friend or the state...which ultimately means the parent has some say, thus some consent.
Marriage laws already differ by state about age and parental consent. And there was already one case where a judge ruled in Texas that because of parental consent a common law marriage occurred and thus no statutory rape happened.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Your position is based on a faulty presumption; it simply doesn't work.
No one is saying that someone who is actually raped suffers less than someone publicly identified as their rapist.
People are saying that someone who falsely accuses rape (which happens very, very frequently) doesn't suffer as much as the victim, who has done nothing legally wrong and just wants to go back to their life.
Unfortunately, they cannot.
As an undergraduate at RIT, I have a friend who was in a relationship with a woman. As relationships sometimes do in college, it died away after they had sex a few times; my friend had decided that he wanted something more than just sex, and since she didn't want to be in that kind of relationship, she left him.
The next morning, he was walking back from the bookstore; public safety showed up with three officers and a police car. They said his name, and he responded with a groan (he was the RA, and there had been some drinking the last week that he had to break up) and a "what's up". He was taken to a room and asked where he was on a given date (incidentally, he had been at the hospital on that date for an injury that had happened during robotics club). He was then told that he was being accused of rape.
Before he was even *charged* with the act, he had to start defending himself to the college immediately. A student conduct hearing was scheduled, he had to move off campus immediately (as in, that night; he had to come back to his room under police and campus safety escort and get a small number of his belongings to take to a hotel which he had to pay for for 4 weeks until the hearing), and he was removed from his job, all classes and student activities, and his position as the RA pending the hearing.
Mind you, this is all BEFORE he has been charged.
The police verified that he was, in fact, at the hospital at the time (two days before they broke up); she quickly changed her story 7 or 8 times as this went on, to the point where the police told her not only that this wouldn't fly in court and that it was pretty obvious that she was lying. At his request, they filed their recommendation that the school that they find in the same fashion.
They didn't; they decided that "no conclusion could be found". He was kicked out of school. If you search for his name on Google (he has a rather unique name), the first thing you see is a bit in his home town paper saying that he was under arrest for rape.
If you think that his suffering was less than the suffering of the woman who put him through that, please, tell me how.
I think that's too much. All those things are already a matter of public record so anyone that wants to see it can. There are a lot of arrests and charges that never make it to the headlines so whether the people involved there are innocent or guilty the majority if people will never hear about them.
If we're going to enforce rules on freedom of expression in this regard, then what ought to happen is media outlets should spend as much time/space/articles/etc on the exoneration as on the arrest. In the Duke LaCross example, that means for every 500 word article with bold front-paged headlines like "Duke Players charged with sexual assault", there should be at least one 500 word article with bold front-paged headlines like "Duke Players innocent; Crystal Gail Mangum and DA Mike Nifong are lying whores".
There are two advantages of it being this way:
1. Those that are already relatively private remain relatively private.
2. Media outlets can still choose what to report on, namely, they don't have to report on arrests and charges at all, but if they choose to do so, they must report on all exonerations and dropped charges for the same an equal share.
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Just say no to irreversible processes!
Listen to yourself ... there's so much anger and bitterness showing in your post, you might want to reconsider your position that you are somehow that morally superior to those that felt suicidal, as those beatings probably affected you more than you think ... "all it ever did", I don't think so. I'm not even sure it's normal to feel that strongly about something that really has nothing to do with you if things are as you purport them to be - those suicidal people did nothing to you. It sounds more to me as though positing your status as being higher than those "weak losers" (in your mind) helps you see yourself as stronger or better (an imagined position you're clearly fighting hard to maintain, suggesting maybe it is in doubt in your mind) --- in fact, what you are ultimately doing is very much akin to bullying those 'losers'. It's all about maintaining a position in the social status hierarchy; your not being suicidal doesn't make you 'better than' those people. You're holding a lot of anger and bitterness down and it's very obvious from every other sentence; your attacking people you perceive as weak (who might be a lot stronger than you in fact, you DON'T know what else they go through) is probably doing harm to the people around you.
I'm sorry, but I really do have to disagree with you on several points.
First of all, why is it that this is suddenly a crime when it's done online, but if you're being harassed at school, no one cares? I spent 4 years being picked on every fucking day for no reason. I'd get hit, I had my glasses and possessions broken or thrown into the water, etc. When I went to the cops, do you know what they said? "Maybe you should see a counselor or take up karate" Really? It's not like I'd taken karate for 5 years already, and was trying to avoid fighting on principle. School officials did nothing. The authorities did nothing. And when my parents went to talk to their parents, they found them to be even bigger assholes than their kids. And when I did fight back, _I_ was the one who was punished, or sent to detention. And it kept going until one day, 3 of them decided to pick on me outside of school on the way home from the bus. My expensive new glasses got broken, I snapped, and left all 3 of them crying on the floor. And then it stopped.
There are thousands of kids who live through that every day, who can't fight back the way I was able to, and no one does anything. At best, if you're lucky, they'll send them to the school counselor, who will then proceed to do absolutely nothing. So please enlighten me as to why this is perfectly ok, even though there are a multitude of suicides and self-abuse cases over similar situations, but "cyber-bullying" is somehow so much worse.
As for the rape story, first of all, you seem to be equivocating statutory rape with assault/rape. This is not the case. A very close friend of mine was assaulted and raped when going home one evening and she's still trying to get over it more than 8 years later. To somehow claim that this act is the same as statutory rape is completely absurd. Why do I feel this way, you might ask. The reason being that statutory rape depends on what the state believes the victim's ability to understand the situation and make a valid decision. The problem is that each state can decide this. Why is this a problem? Because, for example, when I was a senior in high school I began seeing a freshman (an age difference of 3 years). The age of consent in New York State is 17. The age of consent in New Jersey, which was a 5 minute drive away, is 16. How, I wonder, does she magically gain maturity and the ability to make a rational decision if we drive a few miles, and then mysteriously lose it when we go home?
Don't get me wrong, I didn't sleep with her until she was of age (which had less to do with the law and more to do with when she was comfortable with it), but that doesn't mean that the law is any less idiotic in that situation. Yes, the GP's friend is an idiot, and he did in fact commit a crime, but the way in which it played out just goes to show how stupid the law is. In another state, likely just a few miles away, it would've been perfectly legal! At least in NY, we make an effort to make some distinction (it's only a misdemeanor if the perp is under 21, and the victim is over 15), and the severity of the charges increases the younger the victim is, but other states have no such provisions, and make little distinction between a 50 year old man who slept with a 10 year old, and an 18 year old boy who slept with his 17 year old girlfriend. And lest we forget that the latter case goes into the sex offender database as well, making it difficult to find work, a house, etc. I know one guy who married the girl who was the "victim" and later couldn't find a job because he was a registered sex offender.
I'm beginning to stray off-topic, but my main point is that equivocating assault/rape to statutory rape, regardless of the circumstances, is an injustice to both victims of rape/assault, and both parties involved in a statutory rape case. Just because they both have the word "rape" in the name does not make them the same thing.
As for the main point of the article, the most sensible solution is to keep both perpetrator and victim's names private, because both are entitled to due process. Too often, society judges us to be guilty regardless of what a court of law has to say, and the media rarely prints retractions on accusations they make.