Bullying is, sadly, a part of growing up. Most everyone was picked on as a child. The embarrassing nicknames and pulls of pigtails have grown with our ever-changing high-tech society.
The Internet has brought an entire new dimension to bullying that most kids could not have ever imagined in their worst nightmares. Hateful websites, such as the ones discovered after Columbine, raised the popular questions: Where are their parents? How could their parents be unaware of what their children were doing?
Yet, so many parents seem to be absolutely blind as to their children's online lives.
The news special "To Catch a Predator" has become a joke in popular culture, ignoring the seriousness of the problem our children face against online predators.
Online predators take many forms and are no longer simply sexual predators. MySpace and similar websites make bullying easier than ever. Bullies of all types now have an open forum to humiliate, insult and degrade their targets.
Recently, the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meiers raised the attention of cyber-bullying. Meiers killed herself after an online relationship with a 16-year-old boy went sour. The terrible twist to the story was that the boy did not really exist.
Lori Drew, the mother of one of Meiers' former friends, was actually pretending to be the boy. The family would have to accept that this cyber bully was a fellow neighbor, parent and friend.
The Meiers family is now devastated and there is no clear way to punish Drew for her actions. Drew was harassing Meiers, which led to her suicide. Though she more than likely did not intend for her harassment to lead to Meiers' death, she should be held accountable for her actions.
Parents not only have to worry about other children, but other adults who could be bullying their children. Obviously, it is much easier for an adult to manipulate a child and even go as far as humiliating and degrading one.
Unlike annoying pop-ups, this is something that will need more action than a simple spam blocker. At one time, home was the safest place for your child to be. Now it could actually be the most dangerous.
In the fight against online bullying, we need the law on our side. In the cases of Internet harassment that lead to death, there are no clear ways to punish these so-called bullies.
Internet harassment of any form needs to be stopped and laws punishing this behavior need to be clearly defined to discourage it in the future. If passing more Internet harassment laws could prevent even one death, then the goal will have been met.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and it really does. Parents, siblings, friends, mentors, neighbors and, yes, even the parents of other children need to become a support system for the youth of today.
This would be ideal but, sadly, we need better laws to save our children from ourselves.
Bobbi Barbour is a senior journalism major and a contributing writer for the Daily Forty-Niner.
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