NY Times The clues were buried in her bedroom. Before leaving for school on
Monday morning, Rebecca Ann Sedwick had hidden her schoolbooks under a
pile of clothes and left her cellphone behind, a rare lapse for a
12-year-old girl.
Inside her phone’s virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik
Messenger, a cellphone application, to “That Dead Girl” and delivered a
message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a
platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central
Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County
sheriff said.
In jumping, Rebecca became one of the youngest members of a growing list
of children and teenagers apparently driven to suicide, at least in
part, after being maligned, threatened and taunted online, mostly
through a new collection of texting and photo-sharing cellphone
applications. Her suicide raises new questions about the proliferation
and popularity of these applications and Web sites among children and
the ability of parents to keep up with their children’s online
relationships.
For more than a year, Rebecca, pretty and smart, was cyberbullied by a
coterie of 15 middle-school children who urged her to kill herself, her
mother said. The Polk County sheriff’s office is investigating the role
of cyberbullying in the suicide and considering filing charges against
the middle-school students who apparently barraged Rebecca with hostile
text messages. Florida passed a law this year making it easier to bring felony charges in online bullying cases.[...]
Where are the parents in this? They are letting their kids live in a pseudo-cyberworld where the blathering of becomes inordinately magnified. Then they get up in arms when something happens. What in the world is a 12yr old doing with an IPhone?!?!?!
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