Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Consequences and case examples of Cyber-bullying

In 2002, Ghyslian Raza, a teenager from Quebec was targeting by cyber bullies who stole and uploaded a video to Kazaa of the teen performing Star Wars lightsaber moves. The video was widely circulated and visited over 76 million times by October 2004. The teen was embarrassed and became ‘mentally ill’ after the instance. His parents decided to take legal action and sued the parents of the four cyber bullies. An out-of court settlement was reached with ‘the families of three former schoolmates they had sued for $351,000 in damages’ (Tu Thanh Ha, April 7, 2006).

In October 2006, 13 year old Missouri girl Megan, commit suicide after being cyber bullied from a boy named ‘Josh.’ ‘Josh’ was found to be a mother from her neighbourhood posing as a boy on MySpace to gain information from Megan about her own daughter. After the conversation turned nasty one day, including comments that she was a ‘liar,’ ‘slut’ and that the ‘world would be a better place without her’ Megan hung herself. The defendant, Ms Drew, ‘was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanour counts of computer fraud for having misrepresented herself’ on MySpace. This amounted an ‘unauthorised access’ to a computer site violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 1986 (Mail Online, November 19, 2007).


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