Posts Tagged ‘Cyberbullying’

Here at RFI, we believe that social media is a wonderful thing.  It connects us, entertains us, mobilizes us, educates us, sells products to us, gets us into college, and opens up new worlds and opportunities to us.  The other side of the social media coin, however, can be extremely dark.  We’ve long known that criminals can make use of the web’s broad reach to break into bank accounts, prey on young children, and otherwise perpetrate crimes from behind the anonymity of the internet.  But in recent years, as the web gets more and more social, and as young students have fewer and fewer restrictions online, cyberbullying is proving to be a new and insidious danger.

The most recent example is the tragic case of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old high school freshman from South Hadley, Massachusetts, who committed suicide in January after months of verbal and physical abuse from a group of schoolmates.  An attractive “new girl” who had recently moved with her mother and sister from Ireland, Phoebe is said to have aroused the ire of other students by briefly dating a popular senior football player, thus presumably stepping out of her prescribed social position.  Some of the bullying took classic forms: Phoebe’s classmates shunned her, called her names, and, during the last hours of her life, threw a Red Bull can at her from the window of a moving car.  Other forms of abuse took a more modern twist: Phoebe was allegedly subjected to expletive-laden text and Facebook messages insulting her and threatening her with physical harm on a several-times-daily basis.

Phoebe Prince

Are tragedies like Phoebe’s unavoidable byproducts of a culture in which all of us have unbridled access to one another via digital media 24-hours a day?  Is this just what happens when the universally cutthroat, high-drama, hormone-addled high school social scene stays open on Facebook and Twitter and MySpace long after the school doors have been locked for the night or the weekend?  And who, when the administrators of social networks do everything they can to maintain the privacy of their users, is responsible for monitoring the digital hallways in which Phoebe took so much abuse?

This case may turn out to set an important precedent with respect to future anti-bullying legislation, both online and otherwise.  On Monday, nine South Hadley High School students (two boys and seven girls, ages 16 to 18), were officially charged with a package of accusations, ranging from statutory rape to disrupting a school assembly, in connection to the death of Phoebe Prince.  School administrators, who were reportedly aware of severe bullying in the school and had some knowledge of Phoebe’s situation, have not been criminally charged.  This suggests that this early example may lead future cyberbullying cases to be considered lapses in personal responsibility, rather than lapses in adult oversight.

Obviously, instilling principles of kindness and humanity in young people should be our society’s first priority, and this should be the front line in the fight against bullying.  But should it be the totality of this fight?  What protections, if any, should be put in place to prevent abuse of the privilege of un-moderated, non-stop communication that social media offers us?

What do you think?