What goes around comes around: The case of Megan Meier
I confess: the Internet scares me. The erasure of semi-private local spaces and the rise of internet vigilantism is a frightening thing. We’re rapidly removing our ability to escape and outgrow our pasts and I’m not sure of how well or how quickly we’ll adopt the idea that everyone has at least one honkingly huge skeleton in their closet. This dishing out of online pain and judgment usually disturbs me.
But every once in a while, I feel a small twinge of glee when I hear a story about someone who gives and then gets it back ten-fold. Case and point: the story of Megan Meier. From an article in USA Today (emphasis mine):
DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo. (AP) — Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her.
Megan, a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for more than a month before he abruptly ended their friendship, telling her he had heard she was cruel.
The next day Megan committed suicide. Her family learned later that Josh never actually existed; he was created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of Megan’s.
Yep: a grown woman helped her teenage daughter set up a fake MySpace page. According to police, the woman and daughter set up the page after the girls had a falling out so they could see what Megan was saying about the daughter. But it ended with them — and perhaps others — insulting and humiliating Megan, who had a history of depression.
After the story broke, internet vigilantes in O’Fallon and Dardenne Prarie pieced together the details and revealed the names and approximate address of the family accused of setting up the MySpace account: Curt, Lori and Sarah Drew on RottenNeighbor.com. Then someone using the name “Kristen” started Megan Had It Coming. Both sites are loaded with crass, vile, ugly, and mean comments blasting the Drews — Lori Drew (the mom) in particular — and “Kristen” for their words and actions.
It’s almost hard to say that the hate directed the Drews’ way isn’t deserved. Megan made the choice to take her own life, so they can’t shoulder the entire blame for her death. But an adult who chooses to play internet head games with a 13 year old and and interfere in the inherently drama-filled machinations junior high school girls? That’s another new level of effed-up, and I can’t think of better justice than for their neighbors to shame and embarrass them online.
On Wednesday, October 21st, city officials enacted an ordinance designed to address the public outcry for justice in the Megan Meier tragedy. The six member Board of Aldermen made Internet harassment a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.
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
As long as I’ve been on social networking sites, this stuff still worries me. Congrats on the few pounds lost (if congrats are indeed in order) and the new house.
Happy Holidays…
Doug
That is so horrible what those people have done to that girl. She did not diserve it.