Following the MySpace suicide case, the lawmakers in Missouri changed the state’s harassment laws, by including “cyberbullying” as a criminal act. The law was updated in August 2008, but there are already several other citizens that are charged for harassment through technological means.
The most recent case is the one of Nicole Williams, a 21 year-old woman. She has been accused for sending text messages to a 16 year-old girl in a dispute over a boy. It is said that Williams let some of her friends to send harassing text and voice messages to the girl. The messages contained various threats, including rape.
However, Nicole Williams is not the only person to be charged with a misdemeanor and harassment under the law of Missouri. The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch showed that there are charges filed against several other people, including the one of two teenagers that sent harassing and threatening messages to their ex-girlfriends, and a 19-year-old young man, which sent 17 text messages to his stepfather.
There are also the cases of a man, which sent a threatening email to the city hall in which he had protested the construction of a hotel and the case of a teenager who sent several text messages containing death threats to one of his colleagues due to a dispute over a girl.
Last, but not least, a 28-year-old woman has also been charged for threatening her former husband’s girlfriend through text messages, counting up to a total of seven cases of “technological” harassment being prosecuted at this time.
Jack Banas, a Saint Louis County Prosecutor stated that he doubts that the new law will make teenagers and young adults to refrain from sending threatening and harassment messages, as he argues that people who do these things do not even imagine that they will be eventually caught.
A law condemning these types of threatening and harassment was expected since the notorious case of a girl that committed suicide after she had been bullied by one of its friend on the social-networking website MySpace.
Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl from Missouri, was receiving messages on her MySpace profile from a user that she had thought to be a boy named Josh. The girl, which suffered from depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), suddenly interrupted friendship with the boy and told her mother that she had done this because he had told her that she was “fat” and “ugly.”
On October 16, 2006, the girl hanged herself in her bedroom and died the next day. Megan’s parents soon found out that Josh did not even exist. Instead, the mother of a former friend of the girl and some of the members of her family had created the user because she wanted to know what the girl said about her own child.
