In jumping, Rebecca [Ann Sedwick] 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.
Rebecca was “absolutely terrorized on social media,” Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County said at a news conference this week.
This story just made me heartsick. The poor mother.
Yes, and it makes me sick to think that a technology intended for good could become one which has enabled sick minds to cause such grief and misery. In this case, it was the intent to goad a young girl into taking her own life, but perhaps not realizing that she would actually do it. If the perpetrators can be found, they should be required to undergo psychiatric evaluation, and they should also be appropriately punished in a manner to be determined by the courts.