I think it can come from a lot of different things. Some bullying victims may be bullied at home, but no way can you say that all of them are; many victims of bullying have loving parents who are desperate to fix the situation, others never tell their parents, and so on.
(For myself, we were just a nerdy oddball family. My parents are nice, lovely, kind, slightly oddball people who don’t really care about social ladders and were probably not very good at dealing with social stuff in school themselves. Add in my near-complete fashion cluelessness and the glasses, and it was inevitable. I was a non-teller.)
Anyway, I can’t really write out how this girl’s death makes me feel, so I won’t.
People have already found the name, address, and phone number of the mom at least and posted it online. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t being harassed to hell and back by now.
Edit: The name’s been confirmed by the reporter who wrote the story. Check the Jezebel blog if you are interested.
That’s incredibly sad stuff, and the conduct of ‘single mom’ is horrible. I’m amazed she was so interested in “out what Megan felt about her daughter and other people” that she acted like a 14-year-old herself - and then apparently shared it with other people. That’s terrible behavior from an insecure kid, from an adult it’s just horrible.
In context I don’t think it’s cold at all. She’d already told her to turn the thing off repeatedly, and if the mother is correct that the girl sometimes made bad decisions like this, what else was she going to do? It’s not fair to say the mother ‘felt nothing but anger,’ we don’t know how much sympathy she may have voiced earlier in the discussion. But the girl wasn’t doing the smart thing and signing off; she was getting more and more into the messaging and getting more and more upset. What’s the mom going to do at that point other than tell her to turn the damn thing off already?
I think it’s that, if the girl had never tried to commit suicide before, the woman’s actions would be wholy responsible for it. Since the girl tried before, she obviously had other problems leading her to it, so it wasn’t entirely the woman’s fault, just partially.
First off - from what I recall of the article, the girl had never tried suicide before. There’s a difference between being suicidal, and attempting suicide. It’s like being saying, “I’m in a homicidal rage at this pogrocket of a mother,” and actually hunting her down to kill her. Neither would be good things, nor healthy, but one is a Hell of a lot less problematical than the other.
Secondly, without wanting to blame the victim - it’s pretty obvious that the girl had a lot more problems than just the harassment via MySpace going on. (I completely get that her online friendships may well have been the thing that was keeping her from doing anything before this.) I just don’t think that someone who hadn’t been considering suicide for a long time is going to be able to make a noose, put it in place on a suitably sturdy mount, and gather the determination to use it in fifteen minutes otherwise.
That does nothing, in my mind to reduce the culpability of the pogrocket - just pointing out that there was a lot more going on than just the bullying.
While that is true, it also seems kind of futile. I mean, she was a self-conscious teenager. Wanting to know what other people thought about her was probably close to an obsession. At some point, it would seem more productive to move away from anger and start focusing on some damage control. I mean, her suicide was directly preceded by her yelling at the mother and storming off. Then again, hindsight’s 20/20 and teenagers yell and storm off on pretty much a daily basis, so I don’t know.
Regarding the mom’s anger, her mother wasn’t home at the time to turn off the machine, she had taken the younger daughter to the dentist. Her mother was upset with her for not listening and doing as she was told. Megan was on the computer the entire time her mother was gone (despite being told to turn off the machine). I think that her mother, knowing how vulnerable her daughter was, was trying to protect her once she found out how the conversations were going, but was physically uable to turn off the machine until she got home. The mother had perfect reason to be upset with her daughter for not listening.
As to Marshmallow’s post, it’s kind of hard to be a rebellious teen on the internet when it’s a communal/family computer. The parents had already discovered her prior mysapce account.
She mentioned suicide 5 years before the incident. I don’t think I’d put much stock in what the woman says, she’s twisting facts to make herself feel less guilty.
That’s the problem: she apparently got a little obsessive about this stuff, and I don’t see how the mother was going to control the damage as long as the daughter was on the computer trading messages with these other kids. Maybe whatever was said could have been said differently, but with the little we know I don’t feel comfortable saying it was cold or wrong.
Maybe mom wasn’t there to turn the computer off, but if your daughter is hard-wired into something that’s making her miserable to the point of suicide, just get rid of the damn thing. Take a sledgehammer to it.
We’ve all seen posters here who just need to get away, it can be done. Maybe a 14 YO needs a little more help with the willpower department than just logging off. Like getting rid of the computer all together.
I remember the girls who had their cell phones hacked. Big story, their lives (and the lives of their families) were being ruined by anonymous calls. They were desperate, they tried everything to make it stop. Except just getting rid of the cell phones. Had to have those cell phones.
Just like this girl, had to have that computer.
No, you don’t HAVE to have a cell phone OR a computer. If something in life, something that is totally voluntary, is causing you that much grief, just get rid of it. Via sledgehammer if necessary.
I’d say being without internet access is a serious handicap.
But can’t you just lock the computer somehow so they can’t log in when you’re not around?
I know kids these days got tha mad skillz, but even if you have to just use a new password every day or something, isn’t it possible to keep someone from logging in just by using the operating system’s login-password feature?
A lot of people are saying this, but I don’t recall anything in the article mentioning it being a problem before the day of her death. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t until that day that she was being harassed at all. Hell, this ‘Josh’ seemed to be a positive thing for her until that point.
Frylock, the girl didn’t even know the password to her account. She had to ask her mother to log in for her.
This is not what the story says. Yes, the took her other daughter to the orthodontist, but Megan was on the computer before they left, and Tina(the mother) told her *before she left *to turn it off:
That’s the point I was talking about, where I would have simply walked to the computer and held the power button in for 20 seconds, or whatever it takes to kill it without going through the Shut Down menu. (Sorry, I don’t know the proper term.) Unsaved documents as a result? Sorry, them’s the breaks. When I say off, I mean now, and it you can’t do that, then it’s my job to do it for you.
Internet access is convenient, but it’s not crucial to living. I’d be willing to bet that there are people alive right now who don’t have internet access.
I didn’t realize that, I thought it was an ongoing situation. If all this happened in one day during a single MySpace session, it must have really gotten to her.
And it is also completely reasonable to think of death as a possible consequence of access to the internet, and to make one’s plans accordingly. This makes a lot of sense.
We have testimony from the horrible woman that victim attempted suicide previously, and we have the grieving mother saying she talked about it, in third grade, but never attempted.
I can maybe understand wanting one, but the anonymity of the interwebs is a two-way street. Letting people know who you really are is rarely a good idea.