you can’t justify this kind of behaviour on the basis that only people who were sufficiently damaged to begin with will react badly,

Because “yeah I’m a bigot and a bully, but I only bullied the vulnerable” is such a great moral defense. Pukes.

It’s bad enough when kid’s do it, but an adult?

As extreme a case as this is, it raises nasty stuff about age, gender and boundaries. I really hope that adults generally know that being irresponsible with our aggression isn’t OK, but the anonymity of the net sure permits sending it out as messed up passive agression for those who want to.

Just why they can’t be charged still seems strange to me; you’d think at the very least there’d be a case for harassment or slander charges to be laid. If there isn’t a law which they’ve broken, there definitely should be one. But our laws worldwide can’t seem to keep up with the latest technological advances, and so how can we hope to protect our children?

I wasn’t sure if you’ve seen this as well, but there’s a new blog called Megan Had It Coming [blog URL removed - moderator]… it’s supposed to be written by a teenager, but the language doesn’t seem right to me. Whoever it is, they’ve got a lot of nerve to write with such viciousness and attack someone in death. This whole thing is just so sad.

If there’s no law to allow these parents to be imprisoned or punished, there needs to be one.

The problem with all sorts of bullying is nobody is willing to acknowledge the consequences. I spent twelve years of school being bullied. I went into culture shock when I was in university, because I had absolutely no experience of being in an educational environment and *not* being bullied. I wound up getting very depressed as a result, because I *knew* the only difference between my peers in high school and my peers in university was a matter of months. We hadn’t had some magical switch flipped to make us adults – the only thing that changed were the expectations surrounding our behaviour.

The bullying I got wasn’t physical. It was social and emotional – the type of bullying girls do so very well. I had my face repeatedly rubbed in my own lack of “popularity”, my lack of “attractiveness” and my lack of friends. I had it pointed out to me that I wasn’t worth talking to, that I wasn’t worth knowing, that I was a freak, barely even human.

The one lesson I want to pass on to my two nieces is “life doesn’t end after high school, and who you are in high school isn’t who you are forever.” I find I’m less than confident about passing on this lesson when there are people such as the woman described in this story allowed to peddle their poison unhindered. Whose child is she going to target next, I wonder?