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9 MA Cyberbullies Indicted For Causing Suicide
Raul654 writes "Massachusetts teenager Phoebe Prince committed suicide on January 14. After her death, it was revealed that she had been the target of cyberbullying for months (and that her teachers were aware of it and did nothing). Today, nine of her classmates were indicted on charges including harassment, stalking, civil rights violations, and statutory rape. Prince's suicide echoes the earlier case of Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being cyberbullied by a classmate's mother."
Come on people, use your COMMON SENSE! Instead of putting people in jail, we should be educating children to simply ignore the taunts. How the hell did we end up with an entire generation of precious snowflakes that can't take a joke?
Sadly, due to the extreme power of the teacher's union, it is nearly impossible to fire a teacher, for any reason. The teacher could be openly fondling kids in the hallway, and it would be next to impossible to fire them. (instead, they get a probationary removal from the classroom, stay on school payroll, and go to a "rubber room" for a time out.)
As such, there is pretty much ZERO motivation for teachers to control their classrooms with anything other than purpetual suggestions to employ psychotropics, and to control only the most disruptive of students, and then only just enough to get by. (They'll be some other teacher's problem next year after all. No worries about them failing and staying in the same grade, afterall. "No child left behind", and all that.)
What needs to happen in order to reform the public school system, is that FIRST and Foremost, the teacher's union needs to be declawed, and or castrated. There is nothing wrong with them having a union; there is EVERYTHING wrong with that union causing a net degredation of the quality of student education, and circumventing culpability of teacher's behaviors and activities.
Secondly, parents need to sue teachers who are culpable directly, and not the school board. That way there are no special lawyers present. This helps get around the intricate network of "culpability" and "Responsibility" shell games that these organisations employ, and can effectively do what the school boards cannot (Remove a teacher perminently.)
Finally, the "No child left behind" policy needs to be redacted. Self Esteem is not nearly as important as actual performance, and it needs to not be used as a boogey man to cover up/ignore teaching incompetence/failure. (likewise with student incompetence/failure)
Good news everyone. We've not only lost the life of one young person, we now get to destroy the lives of two more!
It wouldn't surprise me if the guys involved fucked her and then had nothing else to do with her and weren't involved in the bullying. That's not the nicest thing to do, but it's hardly strange behaviour for teenage guys.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
if the person would have gone on a killing spree, would the group also be indicted?
...
Megan Meier ... Phoebe Prince ...
Apparently you are more likely to be cyberbullied if your first and last names start with the same letter.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"I'm pretty sure the lawyers in this case are going to pull all the Web 2.0 content created by the students involved. If they go down this path and find something that can be treated as a confession, then it's "News for nerds." or "Stuff that matters." Until we see that, it's more like the 6pm news here in the Boston area."
That's pretty sad you don't even have the basic reading skills of a third grader, otherwise you'd have seen several mentions CLEARLY in the article concerning online harassment.
Wonder if you voted Republican, with the kind of spin you're trying to put on this?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
These charges is what is criminal
They got statutory rape charges because the act in question was so clearly consensual that a regular rape charge wouldn't stick.
These kids may be grade-A assholes, but those charges need to die in a fire.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I am thankful that these sorts of issues were pretty much unknown when I went to school.
Bullcrap.
Three factors here:
1) The news was much more local and much less national, it certainly wasn't completely soundbyte-based and on 4-5 channels 24/7. There are a lot of things you hear about now that you'd have never heard of pre-CNN.
2) Until fairly recently, suicide carried a huge stigma in American society. No parent would admit that their kid committed suicide, and the press wouldn't cover it (for fear that it would cause copycat suicides).
3) Nostalgia is a mind-disease. If you're looking back at the past fondly, most likely, your brain is deluding you. In reality, the past sucked ass.
Comment of the year
/wrists = legitimate method of revenge
Good job, that's exactly what we want to teach the kids.
See, now you're being mean to him. Anything he does to himself might be your fault because you were cruel to him online. Also, this isn't Troll. This is insightful.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
As a kid I copped a bit of bullying myself...
Sometimes when your being bullied...
Maybe you were bullied because you're a stinky poo-head who doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're".
You can't put people in jail for being assholes. If that were the case, we'd all be guilty and incarcerated. Granted what these kids did was shitty. But by and large that doesn't justify criminal prosecution. There's plenty of people here who "should've" done something to help her. That doesn't mean they should be put in jail either. Shit happens sometimes, that's life. It's not fair, get over it.
I'm aware that I'll get modded down for this, but I'll say it anyways. No one made her do it, she chose to do it on her own accord.
I had plenty of people give me crap when I was young and I was suicidal for awhile, but committing suicide is not caused by anyone else, it's caused by the person deciding that they don't feel life is worth living. If you want to blame people who were mean to her for it, why not blame her favorite team losing a game or her boyfriend breaking up with her - or how about her political party not doing well? Someone who is suicidal will use whatever is there to justify it and trying to blame anyone for it is incredibly stupid unless the person told someone "I'm going to kill myself" and they said / did nothing.
This is just yet another example of the sad state of the world when we rush to blame others for the actions of a depressed girl. We now have a society of "someone else is to blame" for everything instead of acknowledging that people are responsible for their actions.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I just had to point out the irony of your sig, "correlation does not imply causation", and the fact that you are automatically assuming that since kids didn't like her, they caused her to kill herself. No one caused her to kill herself but her own decision. But we live in a world where you never blame the person responsible, you always have to have a scapegoat.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Damn! How do I do that over the internet?!? Every time I've statutory raped a girl, I've had to meet her in real life... it would be so much easier for me if I could just do it through email or text messaging!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I understand that the bullies were unrepentant - they felt they had a "right" to hurt someone who didn't kowtow to them.
So you are saying they are Democrats?
Except from what he said (or, rather, didn't say) he never even tried to intervene as an adult should have - his first resort, it seems, was to be violent.
Had I been there I'd damn well have called the police - adults hitting children is not OK unless it's a case of self-defense. Rather than being an adult and handling it right he simply beat up a child. Wow, what a stud. My hero.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.