and the Megan Meiers thing continues

[rm]

http://meganhaditcoming.blogspot.com/2007/12/im-lori-drew.html

I can't decide if it's more or less disturbing if it's a troll as opposed to Lori Drew.

Comments

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

I think, even with all the septic crap around the net, that my childhood would have been much better with the internet. These days outcasts can find people like them; when I grew up, I was isolated from pretty much anything else like me. Even just a touch of sanity, of fellow-feeling, can save someone.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I guess my comment is a bit disingenuous: I got AOL when I was 13. So I've been online from pretty much my adolescence onwards.

I can tell you, as can Racheline, that the things girls do to each other is unbelievable. I'm thankful that when I was online, it wasn't *quite* as popular and ubiquitous with my classmates as it would be today.

While I found exactly what you described, an online haven where I encountered people like myself, I think the signal-to-asshole ratio is much higher for 13 year old girls these days.

All you need is one person to find your myspace/LJ/facebook/IM name/email address, and suddenly your entire school could be at your door.

Racheline and I both had that experience with answering machine messages. My parents shielded me from it--I never heard the messages.

Technology is a double edged sword, especially in this sort of case with young, cruel girls. And in this particular case, sociopath mothers who think they're "protecting" their kids.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that makes sense.

I have some idea of how cruel girls can be to each other. My sister and I went through school in the same grade, and she was as much an outcast as I was -- we were very much back-to-back against the world -- and while I took a lot of physical abuse and plain bullying, she was subjected to social and psychological cruelty that makes me sick to this day.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I tend to think, being older than you, that having had the net in high school would have been a double-edged sword for me, and not in the sense of bullying, but in the sense that my one refuge would have been a thing my parents would have fiercely tried to protect me from.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

That may not be an age thing, but a differences in our parents thing.

My parents openly admitted on many occasions they had no idea how to use the computer or AOL, and trusted me to be safe and read "appropriate" things.

I can see without any difficulty, your parents having a decidedly opposite reaction.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well age in the sense that I can only speculate. There was not commonly available commercial Internet in my childhood.