I hate cyber-bullies....

I've often wondered about the miraculous technology that we have now days. The slim and sleek new designs of computers and the fact that you can now control them with the touch of a finger! I remember back when I was a child, when the computers I had growing up were more manual labor than them working for themselves. Such as the big clunkers that had actual "floppy" disks, and we had to type in instructions for the computer to follow.
And in this day and age, something hasn't evolved for better: bullying. It's more sophisticated and even more visible to more than just the kids on the playground. It's everywhere we go, and some of us are even guilty of it ourselves. I know I am, and I'm most certainly not proud of it. Most harassment was done in retaliation, but that doesn't give me an excuse for it.
The most widespread and often difficult to pin is a thing called, "cyber-bullying." A form of bullying that takes place, for the most part, on the internet and it's many other outlets. Such as Facebook, mbuzzy, and myspace. Many ask why I am even writing about this, but the thing is that it's hit home. Not with me too much, but my little sister.
Cyber-bullying is punishable if both parties are minors. But once it's gone to adult on adult, there's pretty much nothing that the law will do to protect you. I know personally from my sister's experience. I shall call her "Raquel," for the sake of protecting her from further abuse.
My sister is twenty-two years old and currently stays with me. She met this guy online and they eventually became boyfriend and girlfriend. He's twenty-eight and stays in another state. They spoke often either using mbuzzy, Facebook or texting. Now at first, being an old-fashioned gal that I am, was apprehensive about utilizing modern technology for this purpose. (Were there really no available men in our town that she felt the need to scour the internet?)
Reguardless, they flourished. He then introduced her to this other girl that he was talking to online, but noted that she was nothing more than a friend. And that is when this nightmare began for us. This girl, who I so desperately want to name but shall refrain from doing so, for the article's sake; started bugging my sister.
At first it wasn't really much. Just this girl telling my sister that "Adam," didn't want anything to do with her. That he no longer wanted to talk to her or have any form of contact with her. This hurt my sister's feelings' because she thought that her and Adam were doing good. In fact they are doing good, this girl just wanted to try and separate my sister from Adam and have him for herself.
But Adam clarified that he never said anything remotely as to what this girl had told us, and so we let it go. But this girl just continued sending my sister similar messages. Eventually both my sister and Adam told the girl to leave them alone and they deleted her profile from all sites that they had her on.
Problem went away, or it should have. Then came the onslought of messages from various sites under different usernames. Apparently this girl had been feeding her friends lies. Saying that my sister was calling this girl names, that Adam wanted nothing to do with my sister, and calling my sister names.
She even had the audacity to contact my nephew-in-law, telling him that if he wanted a good time to call my sister and left her full name and actual phone number in the message as well! After that this girl began sending my sister some very threatening messages, and some very explicit messages about things that she "supposedly," had done with some guy who lived way up north! She sent messages stating that my sister was unwanted, no one loved her, that she was a loser, she was fat, that she's a whore, and to get off of various sites or else.
My sister is slightly mentally handicapped, and this girl wasn't afraid to point it out. My sister began to get suicidal and depressed. I felt bad, and began my first messaging. I told the girl that she had no right to tell my sister what to do. And that we could be just as nasty as she was, but the fact that we can from a better family that taught us better than that, we refrained.
This girl went all blitzy and turned my words around, saying that I had said that she came from a no good family. That wasn't my intention at all. I just merely stated that we were brought up by decent people and that we weren't raised by wolves, hence why we refrained from bullying her back or anything of that nature. She then called me a bitch, which I actually laughed at.
Later on the harassment slowed down, and we began to relax. What a big mistake that was. This girl had taken my sister's Facebook and copied it! From where she was from, what her likes were, and right down to our deceased mother's picture as the profile picture. I found this to be highly disrespectful and wrote her a long letter which I was careful to not curse or say anything that could be twisted around.
I did this per my sister's request who had discovered this fake profile after being notified by her boyfriend, Adam. But upon seeing it for myself, I was shocked to see my mother's picture on there like that. And that's where I stooped to her level and told her: "How dare you use my mother's picture! You're not right."
Once Facebook was notified of this fake profile, it was taken down and my sister's name order changed. Now it reads middle first last. For a week, it was quiet and we thought it was possibly, maybe over? No such luck here.
She then sent my sister a very threatening message. She told her to committ suicide or else she'd have someone do it for her. Now this shook my sister up badly. So we notified the police who stated that there was nothing that they could do unless she acted upon this threat.
What? They seriously wanted this psycho to come and kill or attempt to kill my sister prior to taking action? Seriously? I was infuriorated with this comment, and it lead me to eventually writing this article.
A few days later this girl sent another message to Adam and my sister stating that she and her friends had broken into my grandmother's house and planted cameras all over so they could get a live feed of photos of my sister. This deeply disturbed me because my grandmother is ill and bed-ridden. The mere thought of someone invading her residence like that scared me.
The police failed to do anything again as we knew that she really didn't break in, but the thought being there was nonetheless frightening. Sometime later she began harassing me more than usual. She would send me messages saying that I was a pot head and that I had no life. Even though she was the one who messaged me around the clock.
She had a few of her friends contact us, (we've counted over thirty different users from mbuzzy alone), sending hateful and hurtful messages. They always send the same thing, though different wording or order: "You're a fake ass stupid bitch. You should kill yourself. No one wants you here. No one loves you. You're a retard."
And the only thing we've really been doing is correcting her grammar and spelling, since she obviously has no idea how to write in proper English. She even got mad at me once for saying: "Go home little girl, go play with your dolls." And retaliated by saying that she was going to send someone to fuck my face up. I'm still waiting.
This girl continues to harass my sister on a daily basis. My sister had previously deleted many accounts, but thanks to the ever so resourceful internet, this girl is able to look up and get any new accounts to send more messages. She even resorts to this one site, called peekyou.com, which is like a free background check-like website. Just type in some info and anoyone could have all your profile usernames from facebook, myspace, friendster, et al plus your phone number, where you went to school, some possible relatives, and even an resident address if you happen to be listed.
I don't agree that this kind of information should be available, and is an invasion of privacy in my eyes. But this girl uses this site to get all of my sister's different profiles. Plus thanks to this site, and the lack of support from our cell phone carrier, (Net10, who cannot and will not block restricted calls at all because they are a "pre-paid" service which I think is bull.), my sister cannot escape this girl.
This girl even calls her from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, just calling and hanging up or going to voice mail and leaving some song as a message. She always calls restricted and then messages us that she's not the one calling and if she is, then what is her number? Hello, you're the one calling restricted like, litterally, a hundred times a day.
It's even come to the point where my sister has to turn her phone off and we miss some very important calls all the time. In her defense, I guess I would have to say that it would be nice to not have a life or worry about anything except how to make my sister's life a living hell even though she doesn't know her from Eve.
This problem has gone on for almost a year now, and some things have changed. My grandmother passed away, I moved my sister and her boyfriend in, but this girl still harasses us. And we even found out that about 95% of the total friends we thought were harassing my sister turned out to be in fact this girl.
She continues to make empty threats, even saying that the police were looking for me and my sister. A little word to the wise, if you're going to make threats like that, you better pick someone that isn't on probation. I go to the sherriff's department every month and had them looking up for anything on me or my sister and their results have been fruitless.
And since I've gotten on probabtion, my probation officer has been very helpful with this situation. She even notified me that the police are still required to make a report on issues like this, so that way in the event if this girl ever did do something, then it would have already been reported once. I appreciate my probabtion officer, and the Lake County Probabtion office for being so helpful.
So with some help of the local law enforcement, word of mouth and hopefully even you. Maybe we can put this bullying and many others that are taking place nationwide to an end. I doubt this girl will stop, but I always remember what my grandmother said: "What you do will come back to you, whether it was for the better or worse, it'll always come back to you."