Sticks and stone can break my bones, but words can never hurt me kill

In today’s paper, I read about the tragic death of Missouri teen Megan Meier (11/17/07 PJS, A11, not on JS website, but AP story is available here). Then I saw it was also in the Chicago Tribune. Then I saw it in the blogs. Then I saw this video (hat tip: Death by 1000 Papercuts):

And this report from CNN:

Megan Meier killer herself a year ago because a boy she met on MySpace dumped her and started saying nasty things about her to other people. It’s hard enough taking that kind of bullying from your peers as a teenager, but she also struggled with depression and ADD, which obviously made matters worse.

That would be tragic in and of itself. But it gets worse. It turns out the boy she met online wasn’t even a real person. He was made up by the parents of a girl who used to be Megan’s friend, and who lived just down the street.

The parents. They are adults. And they traumatized a 13-year-old girl.

They were trying to get back at Megan for not being friends with their daughter anymore, apparently. Can you imagine? I can’t. I won’t. It’s too painful for the mind even to contemplate.

The newspaper in the area — the St. Charles Journal — decided not to print the names of the couple who created the fake MySpace identity and used it to torment a 13-year-old girl. But the blogs did. You can find them on the blogs pretty easily if you want to know. I’m wondering how long it will be before that couple goes into the witness protection program, because they’re going to be the target of much outrage. One of the blogs claimed that the couple’s house was under heavy surveillance by local police to make sure there isn’t any violence done to them.

There are so many questions raised by this sad incident: What’s wrong with these adults that they would do something so stupid and cruel to a teenager? Should there be a criminal charge for cyberbullying? What does this say about the safety of adolescents using social networking sites like MySpace? Should the newspaper have published the names of the couple involved in cyberbullying? What, if anything, can be done to keep something like this from happening again?