suicide via myspace (a story)

I just wanted to link to this story that I found interesting. It's about a girl who committed suicide because the parents of a girl she didn't get along with created a fake myspace page to look like a cute boy, gain the girl's trust, and then rip into her.


http://stcharlesjournal.stltoday.com/articles/2007/11/10/news/sj2tn20071110-1111stc_pokin_1.ii1.txt

 

Good Lord.

 

This story is impossible. Myspace is a perfectly safe and normal activity for teenagers and any parent who is skeptical of it, monitors it or questions their teen's usage of it or is worried about their NBC Dateline flight's of fantasy about the 40,000 or so sexual predators who are logging into it is an overbearing whacko......

 

Sounds like bad news all around. RIP.

 

Myspace is a tool of the devil. ...

It's nice to see that, at heart, kids haven't changed much since I was in middle school. They've just evolved with the technology. Hopefully this mishap will stick with those fools and they'll change their ways for the better.

 

Way beyond disturbing.

 

The parents who "invented Josh Evans" should have their own child taken away.

Anyone that sick doesn't deserve the chance to raise a child.

Nice ethics and morals.

 

The part that got to me:

 

I relayed the story to my wife, who was sitting on the couch behind me as I read, and she said "Sounds like kids I grew up with, like any other girls, only they didn't have myspace."

Myspace isn't to (wholey) blame, the parents are. If it wasn't the website, they sick, twisted parents would have done something else.

 

Does anyone else find it weird that the mother was so conscientious about her kid's use of MySpace, and then was so panic-stricken when she was yelling at the girl to "SIGN OFF" over the phone when she had let her on it?

The point of monitoring MySpace usage is generally to protect kids from predators that might try to physically harm them. Parents should be vigilant in knowing what their kids are doing online, but shouldn't the bigger task be to prepare them to deal with life on their own when you are not holding their hands?

It sounds like this girl was in such a fragile mental state that it wouldn't have taken much to push her to this. It's very sad. The adults who baited this girl and took advantage of her fragile mental state are despicable, and they bear some guilt for her death. But it seems to me that they set in motion a chain of events that very likely might've materialized in some other way regardless of their actions.

 

Completely agreed.

Kids can, and will, be sick little fuckers to one another. I don't think any of us is without stories of witnessing, inflicting or suffering ridiculously mean-spirited actions from kids. Just because there's more technology out there for kids to use doesn't reall count for anything. If we were all plunged into a technical dark ages, kids would still find ways to make life miserable for each other.

Stories like this, sadly, make me laugh whenever I hear the idiocy about "the wonders of childhood."