Ship of Fools: Cyber bullying & suicide, lots of issues.

Thread: Cyber bullying & suicide, lots of issues. Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

To visit this thread, use this URL:
http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=70;t=023963

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

The story of Amanda Todd who killed herself on 10 Oct has been national news in Canada. She posted a youtube video before she ended her life.

I decided to post this after the T shirt, imprisonment thread in Hell. Unimaginable pain. There have to be controls on behaviour that causes such pain.

Links:

Youtube video "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm"

Amanda Todd suicide: The Web has a lot to answer for

B.C. victim of cyber-bullying commits suicide

[ 15. October 2012, 20:13: Message edited by: no prophet ]

Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on :

Such a sad story.

The best way to prevent this is to teach the kids to be smart when online (do not show body parts).

If a your kid is being cyberbullied, get help for them.

Teach kids if a peer is being bullied, to stand up for them.

Teachers should also be taught to look out for the kids who seem to be unusually withdrawn as Amanda had become.

We should also expect our lawmakers to pass tougher laws.

Posted by Horatio Harumph (# 10855) on :

I think all the topics in the the title of this thread are interesting, and yes your right, lots of issues ...

what is the question/thought though?

What are we discussing?

Posted by Soror Magna (# 9881) on :

Well, one important question is why the RCMP informed Amanda and her family of the first publication of the photo three years ago, but appear not to have done any further investigation or follow up, even as the harassment escalated. "Hi, congratulations, you're a child porn star now." Unfortunately, this is just another example of how the RCMP is a now an utterly corrupt and failed insitution. The organization is rife with sexual harassment of its own members, and at least one officer is under investigation for posting his own S&M porn. They allowed Robert Pickton to hunt women for years. I'm surprised Disney hasn't given the rights to the Mountie image back.

Every day I'm grateful Caprica CIty has its own police force, and doesn't have to depend on the RCMP.

Posted by saysay (# 6645) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gramps49:
We should also expect our lawmakers to pass tougher laws.

You might want to investigate what the laws actually are in your area before calling for 'tougher' laws. In these parts, the boy harassing her with the picture of her breasts would likely have been arrested for possession and/or distribution of child pornography and at the very least all known copies of the picture would have been destroyed, which might have put a stop to it right then.

I have to say that while I understand the desire for stronger laws to prevent such tragedies, quite a lot of the anti-bullying legislation makes me nervous as it requires such a subjective interpretation (what is bullying vs. assault), and I'm not sure I always agree with others' interpretations as to what constitutes 'bullying'. And I've heard a bunch of reports of children reporting bullying to their parents or teachers because another child said 'no' to playing a particular game (or somesuch) and it hurt the child's feelings...

I don't know. I'm probably just sick of the witch hunts.

Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on :

I would not know if the RCMP is corrupt and/or a failed organization. I think it is because they do not have the technology to trace where this data is coming from. Moreover, when it has gone viral, it becomes very hard to track.

The important thing is to teach kids to be smart. This takes the joint effort of parents and the educational system.

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

This particular girl's tragedy is being constantly talked about here. What's come to light is that one of the people baiting her is a 32 year old. Hopefully that's going to result in charges.

Re laws, they are talking in the Cdn parliament about a private member bill against bullying. Don't know what the ideas contained are, buy it's a good idea to discuss what can be done re laws.

I think we need to have technology education (call it what you will) re the risks of the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, viral pictures etc., starting very early. They start sex education about grade 4, age 10 here. Both should be mandatory. I would force the religious schools to include it to. Here that includes mostly Roman Catholic schools whose approach more less "good RCatholics don't".

Not sure what else.

Posted by tclune (# 7959) on :

This opinion piece provides some good insight into the complexity that no prophet alluded to. FWIW

--Tom Clune

Posted by Horatio Harumph (# 10855) on :

Someone asked me today how come this one young person committing suicide due to cyber bullying has made national news, when there are many many more YP and adults who do the same?

Interesting thought I thought ...

Anyone got any ideas on this?

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

Ordinary media reasons I think. She's young, female, attractive, made a single clearly defined and easily describable titillating mistake in 7th grade, and the rest of her life has been like a Greek tragedy. It's far easier to write about that sort of thing than about a 30 something unattractive male with a history of vague social/psychiatric issues which cloud the issue of whether he really committed suicide after cyberbullying on the subject of train sets or whether it was really secondary to something else.

Posted by saysay (# 6645) on :

She's pretty and the case involves sex?

We had a rash of suicides early this year (11 teens in two counties in three months); the investigation revealed that it wasn't necessarily related to cyber-bullying (all decedents showed multiple risk factors). But we have a shiny new cyberbullying policy which hopefully won't make things worse (it's probably too much to ask me to hope it might make things better at this point).

It bothers me that this case is in the national (and transnational) news as an example of what can happen if cyberbullying is allowed. If the information is accurate and one of the ringleaders is an adult man, this isn't cyberbullying, it's sexual exploitation (and blackmail) of a minor by an adult. I don't like a lot of the prosecutions in the US regarding child pornography (since it can lead to stupid teen-agers being on the sex offenders registry for the rest of their lives for being stupid teen-agers), but the existence of the law does tend to mean that you can force people to take down sexually explicit photos of minors. She claims that the person she flashed had her boobs as his facebook profile picture; if that is the case, there should have been something that adults could have done.

Beyond that, given that she was physically attacked and wound up lying in a ditch, I'm not sure how this case qualifies as 'cyber-bullying' or a suicide caused by cyberbullying. That a boy who already had a girlfriend flirted with her and invited her over may have had nothing to do with anything that happened online; I'd suggest it has more to do with the completely toxic sexual atmosphere our culture has created. But we can't talk about that without accusations of prudery all around, so I suppose cyberbullying it is...

UBB.classic^TM 6.5.0