Tina Meier Discuss Cyberbullying To Parents

Despite Tina Meier telling parents who attended the cyberbullying summit on Monday night that she has to put her late daughter “in another place,” her eyes say something different when she recounted how her 13-year-old daughter hung herself nearly five years ago.

Megan Meier’s tragic suicide shocked the nation and brought cyberbullying to the forefront of parenting issues.

Now her 40-year-old mother speaks out against cyberbullying and helps parents and students understand what cyberbullying is and how to combat it.

At Monday night’s event, which was sponsored by Verizon’s Cyber Safe Philly program, Tina Meier explained to parents at ’s auditorium that cyberbullying can be an extension of normal bullying that takes place at school.

She said that while some students may see cyberbullying as entertaining, it can also result when friendships dissolve or students want to make other student’s life “miserable” or there is a miss understanding, such as what happened to her daughter.

After accepting a friend request from a boy named Josh Evans in 2006, which later it was discovered the boy did not exist and was created to see if Megan Meier was spreading rumors about a former friend. Once “Josh Evans” and a few others on MySpace started to berate the 13-year-old Megan Meier, the distraught teenager hung herself in her bedroom closet.

There is a video and a sidebar article that features Tina Meier recounting the day of her daughter’s death. It can be found here.

But Tina Meier stressed that not every child who is being bullied, either online or at school, will commit suicide, but she did say that, “boys are four times more likely to take their lives than girls are.”

Using a Powerpoint presentation, Meier said that 42.2 percent of students who reported to be cyberbullied also reported being bullied at school.

She said that sometimes fighting back or even ignoring the bullies do not always work, but having a “buddy system” can help students out greatly, as well as encouragement from other students.

“One nice, kind word that they say to encourage another person, they have no clue what that can mean for the rest of their lives,” she said. 

Meier also offered advice on how parents and their children can come to an understanding when it comes to Internet and cell phone usage:

• Have a conversation with students about how to handle themselves if they come across an instant message from a stranger that has sexual content or if someone posts a mean comment about them.
• Set ground rules, such as, what time of day they are allowed on the computer and what type of Web sites they are allowed to visit.
• Parents should review and restrict personal information that may appear in their child’s profile pages on Facebook or other social media Web sites.

There is a brochure of these suggestions and more that accompany this article.

“I think cell phones are amazing and I think the Internet is wonderful, our children learn so many things that they would never learn with plain textbooks. But with that, we have to make sure we talk to them about it,” Meier said.

She also warned parents about sexting, where young teenagers take naked pictures of themselves and giving them to their boyfriends or girlfriends. And those pictures, under the law, are considered child pornography.

In Pennsylvania, under Megan’s Law, any person who views or knowingly has any form of child pornography is required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his or her life, Meier stated.

After the presentation, Meier told the Haverford-Havertown Patch that her talks across the country are doing a lot of good.

“I see improvement from when we go to presentations and I certainly hear positive things back from parents and students. But if you look at when Megan passed away from four and a half years ago and look at the world today, look at Verizon stepping up and doing this sponsorship in Philadelphia, look at American Pediatric Association that's talking to pediatricians about making sure they talk to these kids about social networking sites,” she said. “The media is out there and certainly keeping this out so everybody understands this. … We are seeing a lot of more proactive things from it.”

Meier was scheduled to speak to Haverford High School students about cyberbullying on Tuesday.

Meier also runs the non-profit Megan Meier Foundation, which details her daughter and cyberbullying.