'Cyberbullying' a Fatal Reality in Schools and Homes

According to www.sprc.org, the Suicide Prevention Center, suicide is the 13th leading cause of death in Connecticut. People ages of 39-49 were the largest group to have committed suicide between 1999 and 2005.

Where do younger demographics stand? According to the Megan Meier Foundation, “suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people ages 15-24.”

“It can happen to unfortunately anybody at any time,” said Tina Meier, the parent of a child who had committed suicide -- just a few weeks shy of turning 14.

Tuesday afternoon, students from Scotts Ridge Middle School walked over to the auditorium of Ridgefield High School for a presentation given by Meier. Grades 6-8 filed into the auditorium quickly due to the rainy weather.

The event, which lasted an hour and a half, was part of a two week pilot program incorporated into the 8th grade curriculum. The goal of the program is to have students focus on self-awareness and build positive character, according to Scotts Ridge Principal Timothy Salem.

 “We wanted to maximize the students’ time with Tina, so we planned to have it in the high school,” Salem said. “We have a tiny auditorium, so we would have had to have two presentations.”

Tina flew out to Connecticut from Missouri, where she lives, to discuss the effects and losses caused by cyber-bullying. This act of cruelty performed by neighbors led her daughter to suicide.

Her presentation at the High School was the third of the day. She had presented to students in Brookfield, as well as East Ridge Middle School students earlier that morning.

Megan Taylor Meier had discovered the social networking site, Myspace, after transferring to a private school in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri. After having repeatedly bad experiences at Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, her parents decided to move her to Immaculate Conception.

“Megan was made fun of like most kids are made fun of,” Meier said.

“Sixth grade wasn’t quite so bad. Seventh grade is when the name-calling started,” she said.

“Megan stopped eating because kids were calling her fat. The only reason I knew she hadn’t been eating was because her lunch account wasn’t going down,” Meier explained.

When Meier discovered her daughter hadn’t been eating, she stopped by the school during lunch one afternoon. She peeked in to the lunchroom to see that her daughter was sitting with a bottle of water and a napkin. She approached her later in the evening and found that she understood where Megan was coming from.

“Even as an adult today, there is no way I could sit there and endure people making fun of me,” Meier said.

“Megan would stand up for other people, but she would never stand up for herself,” she added.

“Megan cried every morning going to school and every afternoon coming home from school, begging me to homeschool her,” Meier said.

Megan, who had a tendency to step in when another child was being bullied, was told by both Tina and the school to mind her own business and “just go to class.” In hindsight, Meier feels that it was the worst advice that she and the school could have given her daughter.

After Megan’s death, Meier has committed her life to encouraging students to stand up for each other. At one point during the presentation, Meier asked the students to raise their hands if they had heard other kids being teased and called names. A majority of the room raised their hands.  

She then asked them how many of them had stood up for those students; about seven or eight hands were raised out of a packed auditorium of children.

Salem later commented that he could not believe the amount of students who were being called names or doing the name calling at his school.

The bullying that Meier’s daughter had experienced at school was brought to the next level through Myspace. Megan, who suffered with Attention Deficit Disorder, depression and the common physical insecurities of a middle school-aged girl, was targeted by a former friend, Sarah Drew, Sarah's mother, Lori Drew, and Ashley Grills, an eighteen-year-old working for Lori.  

“Girls are truly the most vicious to each other,” Meier stated.

The three created a falsified Myspace page under the name of Josh Evans.

“When adding or contacting people online, you truly don’t know who these people are,” Meier warned students. “Don’t add people that you don’t know.”

 “Sarah and her mom heard that Megan had called her daughter a lesbian,” Meier explained. “That is why Lori Drew said she had created the account.”

Meier took all of the steps she could to keep her daughter safe.

“I wasn’t comfortable with Myspace; I was afraid of sexual predators. I was one of those people that watched Dateline and NBC and heard about all of those stories,“ Meier said.

She did, however, admit that she “had no clue what the term ‘cyber-bullying’ meant four years ago.”

It wasn’t enough. Megan remained on the computer when she returned home that day regardless of her mother telling her to log off. Meier, who had to bring her other daughter, Allison, to the orthodontist was forced to leave Megan. Megan called Meier in tears explaining that there were kids posting bulletins and surveys about her.

“Fat was one of the nicer things they had to call Megan,” Meier said of their comments. “They had posts that said ‘Megan Meier is a slut, Megan Meier is a whore,’" she explained.

When she got home, Meier scolded Megan for remaining on the computer while she was gone. Megan ran upstairs to her bedroom, but before she did, she left her mother with the last words she would say to her.

“You were supposed to be my mom. You were supposed to be on my side.”

Meier spent about twenty minutes in the kitchen with her husband before she was overcome with a “horrible feeling.” She ran up the stairs to find that Megan had hung herself with a belt in her closet.

“When people heard the ambulance coming down the street that night, they started deleting that Josh Evans account because they were scared,” Meier said. “Two years later at a trial, that information was able to be found.”

The Meiers were not aware of the adult involvement until Michelle Mumford, another neighbor, came forward, explained that her daughter had known about Lori Drew’s part in the false account. After trying to convince the Drews to talk to the Meiers, but failing, the Mumfords went to the police.

Meier has since helped pass senate bill 818 in Missouri. The bill states that school boards must have a written policy in place “requiring school administrators to report crimes of harassment and stalking committed on school property to law enforcement.”

Ridgefield High School Guidance Counselor, Dotty Weiss attended Meier’s parent presentation that evening.

“We don’t deal with the web, but we get the fallout. We hear everything in the hallways,” Weiss said.

“I think [the students] have to realize that when they are online it is public. They have to be careful; they can hurt someone,” she added.

Alternative High School Coordinator, Denise Brown, joined Weiss for the parent presentation.

“The one thing I notice is parents are relatively clueless, as I would be,” Brown said. “[Students] have access to the internet and their cell phones.”

“We don’t think about the technology they use,” Meier said.

Aside from cyber-bullying, there are a plethora of dangers associated with students’ access to the internet. According to the Megan Meier Foundation:

20 percent of teens have sent nude/semi nude pictures of themselves online

48 percent of teens have received sexually suggestive messages

21 percent of girls and 39 percent of boys have sent sexually suggestive content to those they wanted to date

These percentages of teens are at risk for “sextortion,” a type of blackmail that landed Jonathan Vance in prison for 18 years on April of 2010, after admitting to threatening girls and women into sending him sexually explicit photos.

Meier says that there is “not a perfect solution” but urges schools to take the policies that are offered to them when they come along, encourages students to stand up for one another and pleads with parents to “understand Facebook” among other social networking sites.