A girl killed herself after other girls said mean things about her on Facebook, and so the sheriff hauled the girls off to jail.
Our government has completely lost its collective sanity. Why don’t they just lock up, neuter and lobotomize everybody right now, and get it over with.
I suspect that there is more to this story than meets the eye. Someone wants to make a precedent for arresting people for exercising free speech on the Internet, and this is the wedge in the door.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Your right, there is a lot more to it. It was a lot more than a facebook comment, and it went on for years. Social media can become a useful contact device or a dreadful bullying method.
Then get off Facebook. Talk to parents. Talk to school counselors. Her dysfunctional life was not the fault of other children.
As a someone who was very seriously bullied in school for five years (from age 11 to 16) back in the day when there was no internet, I have a very different view.
At the beginning I was a completely average child in every way. I was not the slow kid, I was not the smart kid. My parent’s weren’t rich or poor. I had friends. I wan’t ugly or cute, fat or thin, tall or short.
Maybe the only thing that separated me from the rest was that I couldn’t understand why people went so far as to be like everyone else. Now at least people can choose to become emo or hip-hopper or what ever and dress like their sub-group does, but back then it was one style for everyone, and that was whatever the cool kids wore. I didn’t go shopping just to find the same kind of cap that some cool kid had bought. It just felt totally ridiculous.
Like all bullying goes, it started from the small things. Friendly ridicule when you make a mistake stops being “friendly” after a while. This in turn becomes humiliation. Mild first, but it gets worse and worse. After a year this has become continous humiliation almost every day. Slowly your friends start to keep their distance because being with you has become a social hazard. You are left alone.
And the bullying is getting worse and worse, since the bullies are being desensitized to what they are doing. Every week they go a little bit further and feel a little less remorse. The victim is also being desensitized: if you didn’t do anything when they shoved you to the ground, is a small punch really some line that shouldn’t be crossed? How about a little harder punch?
But the worst thing is that the teachers and other adults are also being desensitized. They don’t see steadily worsening situation as something out of the ordinary they should have to take action against. Instead they see the victim as someone who is causing his own distress. Basically “He is bullied because he is weird and anti-social” instead of “The stress is making him a mental wreck because other kids won’t leave him alone for a minute and his daily life is of one continuous humiliation”.
I remember that when I finally saw that the situation had gotten completely out of hand (at the age of 14), I tried asking for help. I went to my teacher, a man in his fifties. I described my situation and broke down crying hysterically as I tried telling him all I had gone through and that I needed help. All he said was:
“Nobody likes you because you are a crying little child and not a man like you should be.”
Maybe understandably I didn’t ask for anyone to help me ever again. I took it like a man. Surviving the daily humiliation by fantasizing about suicide, so that all that happened to me wouldn’t really matter since soon I would be dead anyway.
When we started the tenth grade at the age of sixteen the team of six that was responsible for my bullying got split up. Only one of them went to the same school that I did. At first he tried to gather a new group to come after me, but I shouted him down when he first tried to humiliate me. Shutting him up was easy now that there wasn’t a whole crowd against me. He realised that the situation had changed and never spoke to me again.
Soon after that I started having friends again. Slowly I stopped being “anti-social” and “weird” and became a normal kid again. I’ve had absolutely no mental health issues since. I still didn’t like dressing up like everyone else (I still wear a hawaiian t-shirt to metal concerts just to make the case that it is all about the *music*, not getting together to look like a constipated penguins), but I guess that’s just me.
But anyway, back to this case. Her “dysfunctional life” was most likely caused by the ones bullying her. This also means that those doing the bullying have to be responsible of their actions. Systematic bullying for years on end is not something you do by an accident.
There would be consequences if the girls had stabbed her to death or caused her death unintentionally by their own irresponsible behavior – like throwing a heavy object off the roof and hitting her in the head accidentally. Why would driving some child to a suicide be perfectly fine thing to do? I ask this because that’s what they did (based on what little I know about this case).
Then this makes Steve’s comment on the matter even more pertinent. Where were parents, friends, counselors, etc…?
To jail someone for action is one thing, to jail someone for free speech is somewhere I don’t want to live.
Mann, Hansen, Reggie, Laz, TOO, David Appell and the rest of the trolls will be telling the cops about how you thrash them on your blog, Steven, and on the Guardian!! They cry themselves to sleep at night each time they comment here…..
“Someone wants to make a precedent for arresting people for exercising free speech on the Internet”
Ha ha, you’re next buddy. I’ll miss you when you’re gone though, it’s been a blast. Not intending to visit you in Gitmo so just remember you stood for something. Hold fast.
… and your little dog too!
A few brainstorms of mine from my personal and professional experiences (I may be right or wrong):
Both the victim and the bullies likely had dysfunctional family structures. It made the victim susceptible and created the bullies. Good chance of past abuse of the bullies to make them have no empathy. I’m not condoning anything, just think these are likely components of the background story.
The victim should have gotten off social media and the internet after she switched schools.
There are limits to free speech, especially for children, or for those intentionally trying to harm others.
There are millions of cases of bullying at any given point in time, yet we only hear of a select few extreme cases (anecdotes). Given a particular set of circumstances, it can lead to suicide. The victim felt so powerless that taking her own life was the only way she knew to regain control over her situation.
There has been many studies about bullying in Finland. What they have found is that unlike the usual interpretation where the bully has been abused and has a low self esteem is completely wrong. Actually the bully has not been abused any more than other kids on average, and has a higher than average self esteem. His self esteem is just more dependent on the approval of others. He needs a crowd to cheer him/her.
And the most important thing to drive the bullying is boredom. Yes. Nothing more dramatic. No grand traumas or horrible parents. Just plain old boredom.
Think about it. The bullies make a life a living hell for some poor child just because they have nothing better to do. It amuses them somewhat. And then someone kills herself for it. For their amusement.
And then the class that drove the poor kid to kill herself gets regular visits from a psychologist that assures them that the death wasn’t their fault at all. That the bullying was nothing to do with her killing herself. Everyone is so worried that the poor kids don’t blame themselves on her death.
It makes me sick.
It is completely unacceptable for law enforcement to step in and arrest children for calling other children names.
Adults should have intervened a long time ago. Not like this.
There is name calling and then there is serious bullying. Nobody kills herself for simple name calling and nobody just calls someone names for years. It always becomes more sophisticated than that. It becomes the slow destruction of the victim. Piece by piece.
And all this just because they were bored.
If my children would ever bully someone to death, I would have absolutely no problem sending them to youth detention center.
People make their own choices in life. You can’t blame others for things that you do.
This was a case of physical bullying/assault followed by phone/Internet threats. The term I heard used in relation to the possible charges was stalking. Threats and stalking are crimes.
Parents, school teachers and other involved adults should try to stop or limit bullying. It is a more or less “normal” part of life for the young not just humand but most animals as well. But it harms the bullied and the bullyiers and it should be strongly discouraged. However, that fact that someone who is bullied chooses to commit suicide should not be blamed on anyone or everyone who said something bad to them. People who are mentally ill commit suicide, normal people do not. This young girl was like a hand grenade that was going to explode sooner or later. It could have been from bullying or it could have been from how her parents dealt with her. If not now it would have happened when her first lover dumped her or she was denied a new car at age 16. Who knows what pushes a mentally il person over the edge but it is obscene to blame other children who are doing what children have always done and wil always do. Bullying is a fact of life, it coause some to become stronger and some to become weaker, just as any adversity does.
I wouldn’t put the girls in jail. I would beat them within an inch of their self-absorbed lives. Free speech, my foot.
Mother of bully also a former teen-mom and a bully: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/18/mother-fla-teen-accused-bullying-girl-prior-to-suicide-is-charged-with-child/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fnational+%28Internal+-+US+Latest+-+Text%29
I wonder how much in welfare payments she has received.