Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Kids are getting arrested for raunchy online bullying. It's definitely offensive, but is it against the law?
Jul 3, 2001 | The first indication that the seemingly obscure practice of cyber-bullying might have reached outrageous proportions was an item in the New Yorker titled "The New Bathroom Wall." As much as one can discern from the understated style of the Talk of the Town section, the incident in question was not so much a harrowing news event as it was an amusing anecdote about teenage life or, at worst, a parable about how affluent Manhattan parents have access to just about anyone they need, including the district attorney.
Regardless of the gentility of the prose, however, the details packed a wallop.
It seems that students in the Manhattan interschool system -- a consortium that includes the kind of private schools that parents train their children from age 3 to attend -- had decided to pool their vast collective brainpower to find out who was the biggest "ho" in their ranks. To do so, they enlisted the services of Freevote.com, a free Web site that lets users create a virtual voting booth.
The Interschool Ho voting booth listed and ranked 150 students before parents and teachers got word of it and had it shut down -- first by e-mailing the webmaster of Freevote.com, and when that didn't work, by having the Brooklyn district attorney place a call to Freevote.com to give it a nudge.
No charges were filed in this case; no students were suspended or expelled, and the intervention of the D.A. seems to have been more of a warning shot than any indication of an intention to press charges. Charles Hynes of the D.A.'s office told the New Yorker, "It's very clear: There's no accounting for taste, but the site is protected by the First Amendment Free Speech clause."
A few miles away, the students at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y., a wealthy Westchester County suburb, were not so lucky. When word got around school in late May that a Web site run by two senior boys, and accessible by password to about 14 other boys, contained personal information on some 40 girls -- including family history, phone numbers, addresses and, most troubling, sexual experience -- the principal, Kathy Mason, called the New Castle Police Department. The two boys were suspended for five days without a hearing and charged with second-degree harassment, which carries a sentence of up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Days later, Westchester District Attorney Jeanne Piro announced that, while some of the material on the site was "offensive and abhorrent," it did not meet the legal definition of harassment and criminal charges against the two boys would be dropped. The community reacted with outrage. (The boys -- through their lawyer -- declined to give interviews.)
Perhaps the most extreme case of message-board malignancy this spring occurred in Dallas. The postings started May 29 on the message board of a Web site started by a former student at suburban Lake Highlands High School. The thread was called "Lauren is a fat cow MOO BITCH."
Among other things, the anonymous poster, who identified himself or herself as "MOO BITCH," made fun of Lake Highlands sophomore Lauren Newby for her weight ("people don't like you because you are a suicidal cow who can't stop eating") and her bout with multiple sclerosis ("I guess I'll have to wait until you kill yourself which I hope is not long from now, or I'll have to wait until your disease [M.S.] kills you"), and urged her boyfriend, Chris, to break up with her ("I will have a huge celebration and hook up Chris with some hookers so that he knows what a non-fat cow looks like.")
The Lake Highlands message board, which can still be viewed online, is exceptional not only for the viciousness of the attacks on Newby (which included an entire page of the words "Die bitch queen!" repeated hundreds of times) but also because the violence online escalated into the offline world.
Newby's car was egged, "MOO BITCH" was scrawled in shaving cream on the sidewalk in front of her house and, on the evening of June 7, a bottle filled with acid was thrown at her front door. Newby's mother, who opened the door, suffered minor acid burns, and the arson department was called in to investigate. It's still not clear if the person responsible for the postings was also responsible for the vandalism, but in a report filed with the Dallas Police Department, Lauren stated that she believes both were the work of a single individual. (She did not return calls from Salon.)
While there is nothing particularly new about kids who taunt, bully and harass other kids, the appearance of these attacks on the Internet gives the ugly rites of adolescence a chilling new spin. The sense of exposure, humiliation and vulnerability felt by the victims of bullying is heightened, and their escalated fears of social banishment and lasting emotional damage are shared by their parents.
But regardless of how distasteful and frightening these recent incidents of cyber-bullying may seem, they are most likely out of the legal reach of both school administrators and the criminal court system (although Newby's case clearly involved criminal territory; the attack on her home would most likely bring a charge of aggravated assault). All three cases involved message boards run by students but not hosted on school-owned computers -- which means that the schools themselves most likely have no jurisdiction. And none of the cases suggests a basis for criminal charges; the only recourse for the kids involved would be the civil courts.
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