Oh, sorry. The Mother of the baby daddy was yelling obscenities at my daughter’s friend. And I will further note that this happen several times, in full view of the school’s security.
I would really look to the school as a last resort - I really don’t think they want to be involved unless they have to, and when they do, it’s usually some namby-pampy bullshit.
IP-over-DNS is the first thing that springs to mind. However unlikely it might be.
Traits don’t exist in isolation. The same traits that make a kid vulnerable to bullying can also make them predisposed to greatness. I don’t think either Albert Einstein or Nickola Tesla would have been Big Men on Campus. If they had been raised in the current environment, where being the least bit “weird” means you’re the next Adam Lanza and thus deserving of all kinds of shit, these guys may have easily been “weeded out” of the gene pool. And the world would be worse for it.
We can either watch potential geniuses toss themselves from roof towers, in doing so increasing society’s ratio of jerks-to-non-jerk, and then continue to complain that no one has invented a cure for cancer/world hunger/Microsoft Access yet. Or we can treat this as a public health concern and mitigate however we can, just like we do by vaccinating children and protecting the drinking water supply. Allowing us to drink lead-tainted water would also eliminate the weaklings. You willing to subject your children to this fitness test?
“Survival of the fittest” arguments may sound compelling when you’re talking about someone else’s kids. I doubt you’d find comfort in such a dispassionate position if it were your own little girl who’d committed suicide.
The fact is, coincidence or predisposition, this adolescent has been selected out of the gene pool by her own actions. My assessment of that event has no bearing on anyone working “on making those situations not happen in the first place”, since I’m not a policy maker or administrator, but rather, an observer.
Since there are thousands of bullies and victims of same, but a tiny handful of successful suicides associated with being bullied, I suggest that offering counselling to victims is the most efficient way to address this problem. Children and adults (witness this message board) will gleefully gang up on any member of their peers they identify as different or weak. I don’t see any way to change that bit of human nature. In any event, my opinions have no bearing on the behavior of bullies or anyone connected to them, and I can’t really explain anything away … just observe the matter at hand by way of media reports and debates such as this. I’m certainly not tasked with solving the age-old problem of bullying, but I’ll fascinated to hear how you have positively contributed to rectifying this internet bullying in a tasteful fashion. Besides arguing with me … that doesn’t count … I’m not a bully.
Correct. There’s no reason to think this happened because of traits that can be selected for. The more likely causes are bad luck and poor parenting by the people who should’ve been teaching the bullies to act like decent people. It’s true that this kind of behavior - ganging up on the unpopular - is common in human and animal societies. On a certain level it’s how group norms are enforced. But it’s also just insecure kids punishing insecure kids because they don’t have a sense of restraint or proportion. If there are no traits, and I don’t think there are, then kids get singled out based on irrelevant criteria (clothes, social skills, any other perceived weakness) and once in a while it gets carried on to the point where somebody dies. There’s no evolutionary benefit. That’s just callous.
" … just insecure kids punishing insecure kids because they don’t have a sense of restraint or proportion." … descibes the Dope pretty accurately.
“If there are no traits, and I don’t think there are, then kids get singled out based on irrelevant criteria (clothes, social skills, any other perceived weakness) …”
I’m not convinced there are no inheritable traits that select for ‘perceived weakness’, but let’s grant that there aren’t. What is callous about suggesting there might be. A scientist, or at least someone with pertinent cites, can come along and dispute my opinion.
“There’s no reason to think this happened because of traits that can be selected for.”
Well, I’m gonna need more than that. Don’t ask me for cites, I’m callous.
If any traits should be selected against, it’s the ones that cause people to bully others to the point of suicide. So l’m gonna lobby for cyberstalking to be a capital offense. Survival of the nicest.
If the kid keeps it’s privileges, what exactly is there to accomplish by them still being able to constantly see all the bad shit everyone is talking about them? That seems counter productive to me.
Not unlikely. Virtually impossible.
The internal DNS that’s available to the Kid-VPN can only resolve Brickernet internal zones. External DNS queries are forced through a proxy server.
And remember I’m not routing any traffic outside that VPN, period. He can connect to the dual-homed Linux host that sits between his network and the rest of the house, but that box isn’t routing, it’s proxying.
Are you trying to say that they don’t MANDATE the use of the Internet? That’s reasonable.
One thing I’ve heard many, many times from teachers and other people who work with children is that one of the first things they learn is to never assume that everybody does, has, uses, etc. ANYTHING. The most common things that immediately come to mind are television and relationships with extended family; holiday and birthday celebrations and dietary issues are another. In other words, don’t assume that everyone eats meat or brand-name packaged foods, or that everyone celebrates Christmas and that it’s always a happy and joyous occasion. In some households, it isn’t. 
The thread is about the death of a 12-year-old. Turning it into a discussion of her potential genetic weakness kind of sounds like an attempt to find a positive aspect to the death or blame the victim. That does read as callous.
People who think bullying is a form of natural selection are likely to be weeded out of the gene pool themselves.
They have access in school. 12 year olds are in 6th grade. Around here, that’s five to eight page research paper time, with two required internet sources and three sources from books. Part of teaching kids now is for them to evaluate internet sources. So, say my kid is writing a paper on the polio vaccine - we want to make sure that she can evaluate a good vaccination site from the nutjobs. They spend a LOT of time on this now in school, because there is so much nutjobbery on the internet that source evaluation is a critical success skill for college.
The kids who get it (and they all don’t) will eventually make good dopers - they can ask for a cite and point out that the site is biased.
Now, they don’t have social media access in school, but they are expected to do some research at home as well. There will not be enough time in class to complete all research at enough detail to earn an A. If not home, the library - the library will give you access to social media sites.
Don’t want to have internet access at home and don’t take your kid to the library - they’ll pass - barely - unless they stay after school - and the media center is open after school for them to work.
If you had put up with that kind of unceasing brutality throughout most of your adolescence, don’t you think you might harbor some industrial-strength rage and bitterness? That maybe you’d feel joy at finally seeing your tormenter experience the same sort of anguish he’d beem deliberately putting you through?
Do you think the OP’s suicidal 12YO is maybe subhuman too? Just because she couldn’t take a little ribbing? I mean jeez, committing suicide, what the hell was wrong with her?
Maybe you could acknowledge that since bullying can inspire both murderous rage and suicidal despair in its victims, it’s a very serious problem deserving of far more intensive control than has been attempted in the past.
To this day, I can’t defend myself, and people know it. I’m really glad I was able to retire many years before the standard age.
Quoting Paul Graham from Why Nerds Are Unpopular:
We’re so technologically advanced that there is probably less and less reason to expect natural selection will guide our destinies. Can’t see? Get glasses. Have asthma? Here’s an inhaler! Spinal deficit? Here’s your disabled placard … I doubt there is much positive benefit from any specific weaknesses being culled from our species, maybe short of natural inability to deal with a computer or smart-phone.
Let’s say there’s no way an inheritable trait could possibly cause an adolescent to seek suicide as a solution for taunting or embarrassment. Fair enough, then are the parents to blame? If so, is it both sets of parents? The bullies parents have raised some little demons with all of the necessary skills to successfully participate in a Straight Dope Pit Thread. How about the suicide victim’s parents? Did they raise a young woman with general suicidal tendencies? Was the girl mentally stable to begin with? Would she have killed herself over unrequited love in a few years, or over severe depression? Or, since questioning the victim’s survival instincts is taboo here, let’s look at the actions of the parents after they knew of the bullying. Did they take the proper steps to deal with the online bullying and also to cope with their daughter’s mental state? Should they have done more to stop the bullying … could they have? Should they have sought counselling or even psychiatric medications for their daughter?
I’m not sure you’ve read the thread. If there is blame to lay, I blame the bullies and their parents. nearwildheaven blamed the victim for failing to avoid the website:
And this sentiment was expressed by an adult, not a foolish, mean spirited, unsupervised child bully. Expressing satisfaction at the suicide of someone’s parent is rather grim, especially for an adult far removed from childish behavior:
That’s not how that works, but it’s probably not something we need to get into in this thread.
I have to say - nobody’s forcing you to participate here. You do seem to have a lot of complaints about the people around here.
Those are all questions people have been asking here. Not knowing anything else about what happened, I don’t feel capable of answering them.
What I find interesting about this is the fact that what killed this poor girl saved me. While she was being beaten down on social media, that was where I thrived. When I would get tormented in school and the teachers would stare at me blankly rather than help, I went home, got on chat, and vented my woes. I found people - strangers, yes - to communicate with that didn’t treat me like their toy, or trash, or pretend I didn’t exist. I can point directly to one of them and say that he saved my life just by listening to me. I was 13. He was 18. And yet only good things happened from my unbridled use of the internet. I found people to support me, listen to me, say that I was smart and interesting and worthwhile.
When my parents decided to ground me from the internet for an entire semester due to some bad grades, I felt like they were killing me. Maybe inadvertently. I tried to get them to understand what a lifeline this was for me, but they just didn’t get it. So I did the only thing I could do, which was sneak and cheat and do everything I could to snatch that lifeline of the internet back while they weren’t looking. I even went so far as to take my next report card and forge it to have slightly better grades. Poorly and obviously. I think they realized then how desperate I was to not have the internet taken away again.
So, denying kids these sorts of things can have consequences negatively too. You have to know your kid and what use they get out of the internet. I can certainly understand her desire to get back on the internet after all the means were taken away from her. Perhaps she made that new kik account to talk with the few people who did enjoy her company, and it was simply bad luck that the bullies found her again. But simply saying “INTERNET BAD” and stomping it all out could very well hurt some kids just as much as it helps others.