Ethics Newsline®

ST. LOUIS
The ethical fringes of an increasingly tangled World Wide Web were the focus of news reports worldwide last week involving the suicide of a girl bullied in cyberspace.

On Monday, a Missouri prosecutor announced that he could not bring charges against Lori Drew, a middle-aged woman whose online harassment of a neighbor girl precipitated the girl’s suicide.

ABC News reports that 13-year-old Megan Meier hanged herself after being praised, courted, and then brutally bullied online by a person she believed was a boy her own age. It was revealed recently that the MySpace boy actually was a fictitious persona created by Drew, a 48-year-old woman who lived four doors away in their suburban St. Louis town.

Drew admitted in a police report that she pretended to be 16-year-old “Josh” in order to gain the trust of Megan, who had been squabbling with Drew’s daughter. She apparently used the fictitious identity to learn what Megan had said about her daughter, and later used it to emotionally bludgeon the girl.

The story has taken on a variety of ethical dimensions, reports the U.K. Guardian, including the fact that the Drews have themselves become the target of a vengeful Internet community as well as their physical neighbors. Various blogs have posted their address and home phone numbers, neighbors have shunned them, and a brick has been thrown through their window.