Young victims of cyber crime

Something really ugly was brought to my attention this week and when I went in and checked on it, I was left speechless at the lengths the young will go to to be nasty to each other.

It seems a Year 10 girl from one of the British schools here in Bahrain fell on the wrong side of a vindictive person who then saw fit to put together a defamatory little collage of pictures and downright ugly comments - all to the soundtrack of sexual lyrics - and post it on YouTube for the world to see.

According to the end of the diatribe, it seems this poor girl had 'messed with the wrong ppl' - teenage slang for people.

N.B. When GulfWeekly's esteemed editor went online to check it out and contact YouTube to put a stop to it, he was glad to report that the post itself had been removed by the user, who we'd like to think had a guilty conscience.

The post doesn't carry a shred of evidence about what it claims and was clearly just made by a small-minded bully in order to cause embarrassment and trouble.

From the comments made about the posting, the girl obviously has friends who love and support her and are there to defend her and give her the strength to know she's loved and to ignore the nastiness.

Megan Meier from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, US, however, wasn't so lucky after falling pray to an online attack by the mother of a girl she'd fallen out with.

The mother posed as a teenage boy on MySpace and became friends with Megan before turning on her, saying he'd heard she treated her friends badly and went on to say lots of nasty things about her.

The attack got so bad that she committed suicide on October 17, 2006. And, because nothing that was done broke any laws, the people responsible got away scott-free.

As a mother it sends chills run down my spine to think about how creative and nasty bullies have now become and how modern technology has made it so that we can now attack each other publicly from anywhere in the world with nothing but a computer and internet connection as our weapons, leaving each and everyone of us - and the people we care about - at the mercy of any nasty-minded person, regardless of whether it's true or not.

Although we pretty much know not to trust everything we hear or read, hatred and revenge are pretty good motivators when it comes to making up things. Hurt and anger (real or imagined) can cause people to do things they would never otherwise do.

As parents it's frightening how little we can effectively do to protect our children. Megan's parents kept a strict eye on her internet access, keeping passwords on every computer so that she couldn't log on alone and when they allowed her to start a MySpace account, only they knew her password so that they'd be able to keep an eye on it and she couldn't log on without them - and yet still they lost their daughter to cyber bullying.

In order to protect the young we need to encourage them to be more open about what's going on in their lives and convince them that if something goes wrong we'll be there to help and protect them.

Many times a child/tween/teen will be scared of the consequences of telling their parents what's happened to them in case they did something to encourage or cause the bullying in the first place.

What they need to know is that we're much more likely to be upset for them, not with them.

Even if they've done something wrong our first priority is to protect them from harm and put a stop to the bullying.

The potential consequences are simply too high to be ignored by the young or the old.