Usually, the victims just walk away. The damage is done, they figure, and any further action only calls more attention to it and makes it worse.
"They feel like, if they just go offline, it goes away," says Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor and expert on cyber-harassment. "But it's all Google-able. Even if it's taken down, it could be linked elsewhere."
But growing numbers of states, including Maryland, are hoping to give victims of online threateners, harassers and stalkers more legal muscle when it comes to fighting back. A bill that came before the Maryland House of Delegates Judiciary Committee this past week would expand current harassment laws to include postings on Web pages and social networking sites like MySpace.
It was on that site where cyber-harassment hit home for an Anne Arundel County woman, who like many others might have avoided fighting back, except for one thing: They had gone after her daughter.
"She did nothing to deserve this," said the woman, who testified in support of the bill but asked not to be identified to protect her daughter. "It was terrible. Just dropping it was not an option for me."
Last summer, a MySpace profile of her daughter appeared, in sexually explicit language, accompanied by a picture of the girl and other identifying details, she said. It was the work, she said, of one-time friends of her daughter.
"They had had some issues," she said, going on to describe a typical teenage shifting and re-shifting of alliances and friendships. " 'I don't like you any more; she's my best friend now.' "
In the past, the spat might have played out in hallway whispers or cafeteria snubs; today, though, it can go instantly viral - from text messages to chat rooms to discussion boards to networking sites. The daughter, who doesn't have a MySpace account, only learned of the profile when a friend told her about it; in tears, she called her mother, who plugged her then-13-year-old daughter's name in a search engine and up popped the profile.
The bill seeks to expand on a current law that bans the use of e-mail to harass someone; it adds the newer forms of electronic communication. "The code couldn't see into the future," said Del. Nicholaus R. Kipke, the bill's main sponsor. "It couldn't predict that online sites like MySpace would become such a highly trafficked place for young people."
