A Missouri ninth-grader has been arrested for creating a website that disparaged another teen, the most recent arrest in a series of crackdowns by Missouri authorities on so-called cyberbullying.
School district authorities in Troy, Missouri, where the female student attends the Troy Buchanan Ninth Grade Center (pictured at right), alerted the sheriff last Thursday after the female target of the site told the principal about it, a sheriff's spokesman told Threat Level.
"The website had very troublesome things posted on it by an individual who obviously had a dislike for the other female in the school," said Lt. Andy Binder, a Lincoln County Sheriff's Department spokesman.
The name of the website, which has since been taken down, included the target's name and "cunt.com," Binder told Threat Level, and it hosted photos of the target. A couple of posts on the site, which were written anonymously, referred to the target as a "slut" and disparaged her for the male company she kept. The author of the posts also indicated that the target "would be better off if she just died" instead of hanging out with so many boys, Binder said.
"The perpetrator did wish for her death and was very unhappy with her," Binder said.
He noted that Missouri schools developed a zero-tolerance policy with regard to bullying in the wake of the Lori Drew case, in which a middle-aged mother in Missouri was involved in creating a MySpace account that was used to bully a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meier. The teen committed suicide after someone using the MySpace account told Meier that the world would be better off without her.
"The schools in the area are not willing to take the chance of losing another student," Binder said.
Binder said authorities determined the identity of the perpetrator after contacting other people whose names appeared on the site. The ninth-grader then confessed to creating the page and was remanded to a juvenile detention center.
The case has been turned over to juvenile court prosecutors who will determine if the teen will be charged with a crime. In the meantime, the school district has disciplined the perpetrator, though federal privacy laws bar school authorities from disclosing the nature of that discipline, according to a spokeswoman.
"All I can tell you is that our policy for [punishing] any type of bullying, including cyberbullying, includes anything from lost privileges all the way up to expulsions," said April Huddleston, a spokeswoman for Lincoln County R-III School District.
She said the school got law enforcement involved because officials felt some of the statements made on the site were "alarming."
"We decided it was a case that was severe enough that we needed to get law enforcement involved and let them make an independent judgment [about the harassment]," she said.
She noted that the school is gearing up for an anti-bullying awareness week at the end of October that was planned before this incident came to light and is designed to encourage students to treat their peers with respect and be accountable for their words and actions. Oct. 27 is "Sock It to Bullying Day" at the school where students are encouraged to wear crazy socks.
Missouri passed a law last year criminalizing cyber-harassment in the wake of the Megan Meier case. That harassment occurred in 2006, but local authorities were unable to charge Lori Drew with a crime because state and federal statutes at the time didn't address cyber-harassment.
In the absence of a federal law prohibiting cyberbullying, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles opted to charge Drew under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking statute, for violating MySpace's terms of service in helping to create the account and participating in the harassment. MySpace is based in Los Angeles County.
Drew was charged with three felonies but was ultimately convicted on two lesser misdemeanor counts. The jury could not reach agreement on the third felony charge. The two misdemeanor convictions, however, were recently overturned by the judge in the case, who found that the CFAA was "constitutionally vague." The judge was troubled that the convictions, if allowed to stand, would open the door for prosecutors to criminalize a violation of any website's terms of service.
Last year, Missouri legislators updated a state statute against harassment, which outlaws threats or harassing communication that causes emotional distress, by broadening it to include digital communications sent via the computer or text messaging. Under the law, perpetrators can be charged with a misdemeanor or felony.
The law went into effect August 2008, and by December, Missouri prosecutors had filed a flurry of charges against seven people accused of violating the statute.
* A 21-year-old woman was charged for allegedly sending harassing text messages to a 16-year-old girl and allowing others to use her cellphone to leave vulgar voicemail messages for the victim threatening her with rape, among other things. The perpetrator allegedly targeted the teen over a jealous dispute involving a boy.
* Two St. Louis men were charged separately with sending harassing text messages to their ex-girlfriends.
* A man protesting the development of a proposed resort was charged with sending a threatening e-mail to city hall staff.
* A 28-year-old woman was accused of sending harassing text messages to her ex-husband’s girlfriend.
* A 19-year-old man was charged with sending some 17 text messages to his mother’s husband.
* A 17-year-old involved with a classmate in a dispute over a girl is accused of sending the classmate death threats via text messages.
Photo courtesy Troy Buchanan Ninth Grade Center
See also:
- Prosecutors Charge 7 People Under New Cyberbullying law
- Judge Acquits Lori Drew in Cyberbullying Case
- Judge Postpones Lori Drew Sentencing; Weighs Dismissal
- Can Lori Drew Verdict Survive the 9th Circuit Court?
- Prosecutors Seek 3 Years in Prison for Lori Drew
- Lori Drew Not Guilty of Felonies in Landmark Cyberbullying Trial
- Prosecution: Lori Drew Schemed to Humiliate Teen Girl
- Government's Star Witness Stumbles: MySpace Hoax Was Her Idea, Not Drew's
- Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets 'Scary' Legal Precedent
- Blog Readers Out Anonymous Adults that Newspaper Refused to Identify
