As of today with the advancement of technology and it being at our disposal at any given time cyber bullying has become the “after school playground” in today’s youth. I write this blog post today with a certain girl on my mind, fourteen-year-old Eira Maghuyop of New Rochelle, NY. Eira was a bright and ambitious young woman who wanted to grow up to become a doctor or nurse; she was tormented and taunted relentlessly by cyber bullies. Eira like many teens that are bullied took her own life just a few days ago.
Cyber bulling has been increasing at an alarming rate, more and more cases have come forward of teens taking their own lives because of the taunts that their fellow peers subject them to. Roy Malone writes the article that I will be referencing today about the case of Missouri teen Megan Meier that committed suicide because she was being cyber bullied thru the networking website of MySpace. The twist to this tragedy is that the bully who was tormenting Megan was the mother of a girl with whom Megan went to school with. In the original article written by Steve Pokin, a writer for the Suburban Journals of St. Charles County he omitted the names of the culprits behind Megan’s death. He chose to write Megan’s story and her tragic ending, he spoke about her suicide and with knowledge of who was behind the bullying he chose to not print the perpetrators name.
Utilitarianism is based on the premise that our ethical choices, like other types of decisions, should be based on their consequences. Utilitarian’s consider both short- and long-term consequences when making ethical determinations. For Steve Polkin he thought that omitting the names was a simple matter. According to Malone’s article the logic behind their reasoning is that there were no arrests, no filed charges, no suit against them and there was no clear determination as to who actually sent the messages. Was is the mother of Megan’s classmate, was it Megan’s classmate, or was it another friend? If their names were to be released in the article what was the likelihood that they would face crucifixion from the public? Lets not forget the dangers that revealing the name of the underage girl to the public would create, I think that Mr. Polkin did not want to dirty his hands and have to write a story about how people took the law into their hands and took revenge out on Mrs. Drew daughter.
I agree with the Posts decision to post the names of the people involved in this heinous crime. Why should they be protected? The public has the right to know what happened and who caused this to happen. The minute that Lori Drew wrote the first message to Megan she was committing a crime. The outrage that many felt over what had happened to Megan created a major hurdle for the Drew’s, once their names had been discovered and posted on the web, their home and work addresses and phone numbers were posted on the Internet. They no longer had privacy, their home was vandalized and they had to shut down their business.
Individual autonomy is an idea that is generally understood to refer to the volume to be one's own person, to live one's life according to reasons and motives that are taken as one's own and not the product of manipulative external forces. On one hand Polkin believed took into consideration that Lori Drew’s daughter was a minor and exposing her name and family would most definitely put her in harms way. He did what he believed was ethical, wrote the paper but did not give any names because they were not made public at that time. On the other hand, the Post believed that they had a public duty to disclose the names of those involved in the name. The Post took justice into their own hands and printed the names of those involved, even though the names we already made public on a local scale the Post printing their names made them national news.
As much as I would love to see social networks control the content and the bullying that is being done on these websites I feel that this is too much of a big task to tackle. Intervention should come from the parents and knowing what’s going on in their children’s lives. These social websites are a playground for dangerous and criminal behavior. Do these social networking websites have someone that monitors bullying? I am not too sure, with more than 800 million active users on Facebook and more to come once Facebook becomes public its too much of a challenge to try to monitor suspicious behavior. Like I said, as difficult and time consuming it can be parents really need to take their time and monitor their children and their online use.
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