Phoebe Prince Story Finally Brings Bullying Into the Light of Day (plus a few other unspoken details)

MoonHowler
Characters from the Stop Bullying Now website
Characters from the Stop Bullying Now website

Hopefully Phoebe Prince’s life was not in vain. Bullying has been around since the caveman. However, never has the emphasis been so keen as now. It seems that the death of Phoebe Prince has become the Columbine of school bullying.

As more is being told about this tragic event, we find out that that the root of the problem was  because Phoebe caught the eye of one of the star football players. The statutory rape charge resulted from the fact that he was 18 and she was 15. He was also one of her harassers. His girlfriend and her buddies then got into the act of persecuting Phoebe for going out with her boyfriend. You know, that all too familiar case where it is all the girl’s fault and the boy is off the hook for any wrong doing.  At any rate, on the last day of her life, Phoebe was hit with an energy drink can thrown from a car when she was walking home from school.  She went into her house and hanged herself with a scarf given to her on her birthday. 

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Another Bullying Story with a Bad Ending

MoonHowler

 

The cable news channels are full of the sad story of Tyler Clementi.  Tyler was a freshman at Rutgers University and committed suicide last week by jumping off a bridge to his death in the Hudson River.  What caused this young man to go to such drastic measures to end his life?

Tyler had a sexual encounter in his dorm room.  Apparently he asked for the room until midnight.  Unbeknownst to him, the roommate left his computer open and the web cam streamed the entire episode onto the Internet.  The roommate and a friend tweeted the information.  Tyler’s encounter was with another man. 

One has to ask what kind of monsters would do something like this?  Recording this young man’s personal sexual encounter was just another form of bullying.  Bullying goes on all the time.  In fact, there is an epidemic going on in this country and it isn’t just against gays.  Phoebe Prince  of Massachusetts wasn’t gay.  She was basically tortured to death by her peers, who have been charged in her death.  Tyler’s bullies, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, have been charged with invasion of privacy.  They can receive punishment of up to five years in prison. 

People don’t send their children to public school or to college to have them bullied by others to the point they take their own lives. Suicide with gay youth is 4 times that of straight kids. Yet, is bullying just a phenomena with young people or can it happen with any group? Does it happen at the office, in the neighborhood, in our political dealings, on the blogs? Bullying can and does happen everywhere.

We all need to look to see if our behavior involves bullying. We also need to watch for bullying behavior with our kids. Some of the most serious bullying starts with older siblings. However, experts say that today’s technology allows bullying to be carried to new levels. No longer are kids just beaten up on the playground or jumped on the way home and their lunch money stolen like in the good old days. Now people can sit behind a computer, such as happened with Tyler Clementi, and create situations that make someone’s life no longer worth living. Some folks survive and laugh at their tormentors. Others, like Tyler, decide to end it all.

Bullied Teen’s Tormentors Indicted

MoonHowler

 

Bullying is a serious problem in the United States. It has always been around on playgrounds, at schools, and in the neighborhood. However, with the widespread use of the Internet, bullying has become more pervasive and yes, virulent.  Verbal taunts and physical threats became a way of life for one  young immigrant girl. 

15-year-old Phoebe Prince was the victim of extreme bullying from her peers. Phoebe, who recently moved  South Hadley, MA from Ireland, was bullied by classmates until she hanged herself in January. The bullying was described as relentless and happened in the halls, at school, in the library, in class, via cell phone messages and on the Internet. Nine teenagers   have been indicted for the death of this young girl.

According to the New York Times:

The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.

The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers

Of course the tormentors bear the main responsibility for the girl’s death. But are others culpable? How about the parents of those kids? How about the school? How about her friends?  Was anyone aware that this was going on? Didn’t some teacher notice that a child was being tortured? How do parents help their children when they are being bullied? This tragedy seems so avoidable.