Elephant in the Room

MySpace, a social networking site owned by News Corporation

In my first blog post Wednesday night I discussed a little about my use of Facebook and Twitter. Both have been useful forms of the social media for me and millions of other, but recently there seems to be a dangerous trend among high schoolers and middle schoolers with their use of these social media. Facebook and Twitter have been the scapegoats for many issues over the years. Most recently, Facebook has even been blamed for the increasing syphilis cases in the United Kingdom and Twitter was used as evidence in a murder case in which the offender wrote a threatening tweet aimed towards his victim only hours before killing her.

But the trend that seems to be the most disturbing is act of cyberbullying that led to another teenage girl to take her own life. 15 year old Phoebe Prince of Massachusetts hung herself from a stairwell a few weeks ago due to what the New York Times reported as “taunting and physical threats [that] were beyond the pale.” She would receive constant text messages and Facebook posts mocking her brief relationship with a senior at the high school and had to walk down the halls with students constantly calling her an “Irish slut.” This happened every day. Nine students were indicted in this case for harassment that school officials described as beyond the normal teasing and quarrels in high schools. This is not the first cyberbullying case that has led to teenage suicide. 11 year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoove took his life in another Massachusetts case due to excessive bullying about his alleged homosexuality. 13 year old Megan Meier hung herself because of the mother of another student abused her via MySpace. In another case involving the publicity of the victim’s rumored homosexuality over the Internet, 13 year old Ryan Halligan also committed suicide.

The first question to ask in these cases is where the school administrators and teachers are in these bullying cases and what are they doing to prevent this. In all of the cases above, the bullying went outside the realm of the Internet and was very prominent inside the schools as well. The district attorney in the Phoebe Prince case said that there were teachers and other staff that were well aware of the extent of the bullying as it was going on. No laws were broken but these people need to be held partially responsible for not intervening and trying to put it to an end. Anyone in an educational environment has the responsibility to point out these problems and do something to stop it or at least make a higher administrator aware of the situation. There have not been a very high number of these cases leading to suicide, but think of the consequences of this continued bullying which we all know is a daily occurrence in grade school. Middle school and high school is a crucial time for students to grow both intellectually and to see growth in self-esteem and confidence. The teachers and staff are hired based on how effective they can be to ensure this growth by teaching them the skills they need. Therefore, they should be responsible when situations like this hinder that growth.

What the schools have more difficulty controlling these days is how their students are using the social media available to them. In all the suicide cases I listed, sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter were cited as resources in this excessive abuse. No one can fully expect these sites to govern the things that are being said to people but if you go onto these sites, good luck seeing something along the lines of “Report Abuse” on the sites. Granted I found it by going into help, typing in report abuse, and after scrolling through I found an email address to write too. This should be far more accessible. Facebook knows that these suicides are occurring and that they have cited as a resource for the cyberbullying, but they refuse to accept any fault or guilt in the matter, claiming their only responsibility is to allow social networking. Again, they should not actually be held responsible for these deaths, but social networking sites should be improving their abuse reporting to their part in preventing more young lives from committing suicide. Schools themselves are starting to regulate what their students are doing on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter and have been suspending kids for things said, but with the privacy settings on these sites, it prevents the schools from having total disclosure of student posts. Therefore these sites need to do more to encourage potential victims to report this abuse.

Massachusetts is discussing possible new laws that would discourage this specific activity and making the punishment for involvement in these teenagers’ suicides harsher. In the Phoebe Prince case, nine students were indicted and of those nine, two of them were expelled from the school. Some seem to be advocating that these students have free speech, but we all know that freedom of speech is not an absolute right, as first stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919 when he said a person can’t scream fire in a crowded movie theatre. Others say it’s just kids being kids, but that’s a bold argument when the victims will never have the opportunity of being an adult and living a long life. Under current Massachusetts laws, prosecutors have indicted these students based on hazing, criminal harassment, stalking, and more. What Massachusetts needs to do is pass laws specific to cyberbullying in order to help prevent emotional harm and in these extreme cases, suicide. The laws should make any staff that knowingly ignores these actions responsible for the result of bullying and the laws should require social networking sites to take greater steps in allowing teenagers to report abuse so that the right people can step in. In the meantime, however, it seems it is up to the parents to advise their kids on the dangers of cyberbullying and the criminal punishment they could face if they engage in this activity.

Update (4/6/10)- Three of the nine students indicted in the Phoebe Prince case did not show up to their court date scheduled for today.