“Meatspace”: what a charming term for human interaction.
If this story proves nothing else, it proves that the Internet IS a “human interaction” medium.
And yet, I still managed to have a facebook account in high school. Weird.
After being beat down? Is that the past pluperfect reciditive of being beatEN down?
Inability of the modern press to handle irregular verbs aside, the heartening story in this case is that no suicides took place because of real-life, physical bullying during this period. We know this because if they had, this would be another “bullying” story, not a “cyberbullying” story.
One thing we can all agree on is that a lot of people failed this girl on multiple levels.
This.
If they have to do all their work at home on a laptop in the kitchen/dining room under supervision it is not child abuse. And nobody needs to have a smart phone, there used to be specific kid friendly clamshells that has 6 or 10 preset phone numbers - 911, home, and whatever else the parents had preset. Hell, in this case homeschooling springs to mind - if you really want to control your kids access to other people to curtail possible cyber bullying, home school them and sit there while they are on line doing work. No school, no unsupervised internet, no smartphone. Not every family has 2 working parents or 2 fulltime working parents. I regularly see job postings for 4 hour part time jobs - one was for the Connecticut meals on wheels project doing some sort of data processing, they wanted them from 10 am to 2 pm, perfect for a working mom.
So there was no supervision for the ones doing the bullying, I guess.
Its harder than you think to monitor a teens internet usage. You don’t give them a smart phone, they use their friends. They use a public computer. They set up accounts under a different name. They switch social media sites. Its easy to hide from your parents on the internet and access is pretty ubiquitous. One of my daughter’s friends is a very active facebook user at 13 - despite not having unsupervised internet access in the house or a smart phone and parents who forbid facebook.
(Come on guys, you were teens - did your parents know what you were doing all the time? Could you do things your parents had forbidden? I was a good kid way back before the internet was an issue for teens - with very active parents - and I pulled shit off. I can’t imagine how easy it was for my classmates who had two working parents and more motivation to misbehave)
And the bullied girl did report it - there are prior police reports for being physically assaulted that resulted in no action except to have her parents pull her to homeschool her - why would anyone think the police would step in for cyber bullying when they didn’t bother to step in for physical assault.
If you had a facebook account in the late 90s early 00s, that’s pretty amazing. It wasn’t written until October 2003 and didn’t get outside Harvard until 2005. By the late 2000s - sure you can get Facebook - that’s only a few years ago.
True, I didn’t get facebook til I was a senior in 2007 (they had just removed the restriction of needing a .edu email address to sign up), but before that everyone at my school was on myspace and a few people were on Xanga. AIM, ICQ, IRC MSN Messenger were all extremely popular. The idea that social media only started a few years ago is laughable.
Myspace , AIM, ICQ, and chat clients (I was more of a Yahoo girl myself) never had the bullying problems of facebook - and never skewed down to ten and twelve year olds (my kids both didn’t get Facebook accounts until they were 13 - the VAST majority of my sons friend had them at nine or ten - after all, they could talk to grandma on it). Most of them were primarily one to one means of communications (myspace wasn’t), and had more of what prior to myspace way back in 1998 when I started "the internet"was considered a “personal home page” so your friends could check up on you (which became livejournal and blogging).
Facebook was a game changer in the social media space.
I wish I had a time machine so I could take you to 2005 so you could see how much drama Top 8 caused.
Things change over time and I’m not denying that. What I do deny is Longshank’s assertion that a 12 year-old without a smartphone or a computer in their bedroom is somehow untenable in 2013. It’s not.
Hey, what the hell man? That isn’t the point. Yesbulliesarebadshameonthem.
But the real issue here is that this girl is clearly at fault. Why did this girl want to access the internet? I mean cmon, no one uses that thing, especially not teenagers. Why did the victim read these constant messages? There certainly aren’t many many ways to get to someone online, no possible way for this girl to be tracked down by those bullies. And she accessed social media sites? Why on earth would a teenager be interested in talking to other people? And her parents weren’t standing over her shoulder watching her from the moment she got up to the moment she fell asleep? They should be arrested! She clearly should have just turned off her computer, unplugged her phone, and stopped getting mail. Completely isolating her from all contact with anyone her age would definitely have stopped her from committing suicide.
:rolleyes: This is pathetic. It sure is a good thing we have so many obviously 12 year old posters here able to relate who know nothing of this girl’s situation to tell us all about how it’s totally her and her parent’s fault.
This attitude is why large groups of kids are able to bully other kids into suicide. Oh it couldn’t have been that bad, oh she should have just ignored them, oh that’s just kids being kids.
My 11-year-old has a computer in his bedroom with Internet access. But I am absolutely confident he’s not seeing any inappropriate content.
Yeah, without saying too much, that’ something that I also need to work on.
lol.
Why “lol?”
He is expressing disbelief of both the idea that you know of everything your child does on his computer, and/or that your child has never tried or succeeded to find inappropriate material on the internet.
Edit: Not that either are impossible, they just require a lot more effort than what is normal.
Why would anybody (adult or child) get on the Internet with their real name? Use an alias. If trolls get too bad then move to another board with a new alias. Leave the trolls behind in the dust.
I can’t imagine being some troll’s punching bag for a year. If nothing else rip the DSL out of the wall and burn it. Get rid of the smart phone and use a cell phone. That’s better than reading hate posts daily.
None of my real world friends or coworkers know my Internet aliases. I have a couple accounts under my real name for work, close family, and ECommerce that’s it. Everything else is an alias.
Or, like I said earlier, if those girls were bullying and harassing her, it was probably because of something she did to embarrass her parents. :rolleyes: