The spate of teen-suicide-via-cyberbullying stories continues unabated, but becomes no less tragic with each passing instance. Implicit within each article is that Something Must Be Done, according to the judgment one finds on each of the persons involved -- the vicious classmates, the do-nothing school administrators, the hapless parents, the sad victims themselves. No winners there; no easy judgments to be made. The bottom line is that the whole tragic event is horrible, and didn't need to happen.
Yes, kids are cruel. They have always been cruel, this is news to anyone? Technology has both enabled said cruelty, and allowed the torturers to distance themselves from their victims. Certainly Rebecca Sedwick's bullies should, in a just universe, feel the weight of their collective guilt every day for the rest of their miserable little lives.
But obviously the teen years are a tremendously volatile time of life, rendered vivid and intense by social pressures and physical changes. The things that make one kid unable to handle a barrage of nasty electronic screeds are the same things that make other kids unspeakably insensitive to the turbulence every one of them endures. The hallmark of being a teenager is that one has zero perspective on mortality, or consequences, or impulse control.
And Rebecca Sedwick's mother apparently did everything she could to rectify the bullying situations, to the extent of her knowledge. You could make the argument that perhaps a 12-year-old doesn't need a smartphone, but for many families there's a built-in safety issue there. There is a practical use, and you can only police so much, though of course you have to be alert against those who would urge someone else to kill themselves, as well as those who would take up such invitations. However, at some point you really do have to trust your kids, your instincts, the rest of the world. A life of hypervigilance and excessive paranoia is no life either.
It would be nice if things always worked out, if there were always sensible solutions available, if kids on the edge understood that it really does get better, that high school is not the be-all/end-all by any means, and that a permanent solution to a temporary problem is exactly that. If only you could communicate that to every kid in school right now, happy or unhappy, bullied or bully, suicidal or on top of the world.
Things change, more than any of them could ever know, whether they believe it or not. The roles frequently reverse, or at least change radically; the awkward, different kid getting picked on finally blooms, and realizes that high school is just bullshit anyway, and that life has much more to offer, while the bully frequently finds out the hard way that their few years playing King Shit of Turd Hill is about as good as it's gonna get for them.
In the meantime, maybe schools do need to start making examples of bullies, whether "traditional" or electronic. Expel them, send them home, make their clueless parents have to deal with their sociopathic bullshit. You can't child-proof the world, but you can crack down on the assholes who inhabit it with impunity. Fuck them. It's easy to blame the technology, or negligence on someone's part, or "the culture," whatever that entails, but maybe it's just us. Maybe we're just fucking mean, and maybe we're just too tolerant of that meanness at a time in life that is far too volatile and impulsive to handle it.
Yes, kids are cruel. They have always been cruel, this is news to anyone? Technology has both enabled said cruelty, and allowed the torturers to distance themselves from their victims. Certainly Rebecca Sedwick's bullies should, in a just universe, feel the weight of their collective guilt every day for the rest of their miserable little lives.
But obviously the teen years are a tremendously volatile time of life, rendered vivid and intense by social pressures and physical changes. The things that make one kid unable to handle a barrage of nasty electronic screeds are the same things that make other kids unspeakably insensitive to the turbulence every one of them endures. The hallmark of being a teenager is that one has zero perspective on mortality, or consequences, or impulse control.
And Rebecca Sedwick's mother apparently did everything she could to rectify the bullying situations, to the extent of her knowledge. You could make the argument that perhaps a 12-year-old doesn't need a smartphone, but for many families there's a built-in safety issue there. There is a practical use, and you can only police so much, though of course you have to be alert against those who would urge someone else to kill themselves, as well as those who would take up such invitations. However, at some point you really do have to trust your kids, your instincts, the rest of the world. A life of hypervigilance and excessive paranoia is no life either.
It would be nice if things always worked out, if there were always sensible solutions available, if kids on the edge understood that it really does get better, that high school is not the be-all/end-all by any means, and that a permanent solution to a temporary problem is exactly that. If only you could communicate that to every kid in school right now, happy or unhappy, bullied or bully, suicidal or on top of the world.
Things change, more than any of them could ever know, whether they believe it or not. The roles frequently reverse, or at least change radically; the awkward, different kid getting picked on finally blooms, and realizes that high school is just bullshit anyway, and that life has much more to offer, while the bully frequently finds out the hard way that their few years playing King Shit of Turd Hill is about as good as it's gonna get for them.
In the meantime, maybe schools do need to start making examples of bullies, whether "traditional" or electronic. Expel them, send them home, make their clueless parents have to deal with their sociopathic bullshit. You can't child-proof the world, but you can crack down on the assholes who inhabit it with impunity. Fuck them. It's easy to blame the technology, or negligence on someone's part, or "the culture," whatever that entails, but maybe it's just us. Maybe we're just fucking mean, and maybe we're just too tolerant of that meanness at a time in life that is far too volatile and impulsive to handle it.
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