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When I was around 12, an older girl in my school began to bully me and my friends for a while. She would stop us any time anywhere, call us names and demand money, threatening us with violence if we didn’t give her what she wanted. She never touched us but her menacing words and size meant that for those few days we lived in fear, especially of bumping into her on our way home. We eventually plucked up the courage to report her to the head master thinking that a severe reprimand would be the end of it. But it turned out we weren’t the only people experiencing the bullying. The police became involved and before I knew it the girl’s father had taken her out of school. I never saw her again. This was face to face bullying, and thankfully for me my only experience. It was a time well before the internet created a new space for a new kind of threat, online bullying, harassment or trolling. There’s a growing concern about the causes and effects of this phenomenon but the sad death of Brenda Leyland is a sobering reminder that what we write and say can have terrible consequences for ourselves as much as for others. Brenda Leyland was confronted by a news reporter near her home regarding her comments about the Mccann family and subsequently found dead in a hotel room on Saturday. As yet there may be no definitive link between the events but social media can make victims out of all of us and if we see it simply as a tool for free expression we’re fooling ourselves. Of course social media sites are morally neutral tools facilitating both good and bad. But over the decades we’ve confronted the debilitating consequences of bullying in our institutions, stressed to children the need for kindness in the playground and yet we still feel hesitant in saying to adults that an open and free society mustn’t become a nasty and bigoted society all in the name of freedom of expression. Quite simply what we do and say matters even when we choose to remain anonymous; there is no virtual world there is only the real world where real people write and real people get hurt. Islam as a faith began with the command to read in the name of God. Over the centuries much ink and blood has been spilt on how to understand God’s words. Today Muslims are again rather tragically wrestling with all kinds of scriptural meanings as religious fanatics use social media to spread more destruction. Its only words some will argue and they’re right except that words have a frightening potential – they can inspire and lift, they can damage and destroy and ultimately they can change people’s lives forever.