The Phoebe Prince Case

On January 14th, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself at her parents' home.

Investigators have now accused nine of her classmates with the bullying that may have prompted the suicide.

At a recent news conference, Northwestern Massachusetts District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel detailed the charges against those South Hadley High School classmates. According to the Boston Globe, the charges included statutory rape, violation of civil rights, criminal harassment and disturbance of a school assembly.

Prince, who recently immigrated to the United States from Ireland with her family, was the target of abuse and bullying since last fall, Scheibel said, sometimes within the view of school staff, including the day she took her own life.

Prosecutors believe that Prince was being bullied over a brief relationship with a boy at the school.

The students named in the indictments are Sean Mulveyhill, 17; Kayla Narey, 17; Austin Renaud, 18; Ashley Longe; 16, Flannery Mullins, 16; and Sharon Chanon Velazquez, 16. Mulveyhill and Renaud were the only students charged with statutory rape. Three other female students were also charged with crimes including assault with a dangerous weapon and violation of civil rights, but their names were not released.


This from Slate:

Cyberbullying is trickier than the on-campus variety for schools to police. The basic conundrum is that harassment via Facebook, text messaging, and e-mail usually involves off-campus student speech, which is more protected by the First Amendment than what happens on school grounds.

The standard is that schools can only discipline students for off-campus speech if it causes a "material and substantial disruption" within school. Online bullying that takes place off-campus is a new test for this standard, and courts are just beginning to sort it out. So far, they've been split. Some judges have said that speech that makes it difficult for one student to learn counts as a substantial disruption, as Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use explains. Other courts have erred on the side of protecting the First Amendment rights of students by ruling that schools can only discipline for bullying that disrupts school activities more widely. (See this recent ruling in California.) Unsure of their power to discipline, schools sometimes assume they can't do anything at all.

But that's never true says Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor who directs the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State College. "They can always sit down with the cyberbully and with the parents and say: 'This isn't about discipline. It's about making sure you understand that if you take this further, you could break the law. And also you're really hurting people. Often, in milder cases, kids underestimate how hurtful what they're doing is." Schools can support the kids who are targets of bullying, too, as South Hadley tried to do.

This from Slate:

The Blame Game

Should the school officials
involved in the Phoebe Prince bullying case
lose their jobs?

When District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel charged the nine teens in late March, she said that Phoebe had endured a three-month campaign of bullying that was "common knowledge" among the students at the high school. She also said that "the investigation has revealed that certain faculty, staff, and administrators of the high school also were alerted to the harassment of Phoebe Prince before her death."

[School Committee Chair Edward] Boisselle and Superintendent Gus Sayer have responded with what looks from the outside like a completely tone-deaf series of scoffs and denials. "Did they go interview all 700 kids at the school and found out that more than 300 knew about it? Isn't that the only way you could tell that they factually knew about it?" Boisselle asked in the Boston Herald.

In print interviews and on CNN, Sayer has stuck to the oddly unapologetic line that the high school did all it could for Phoebe. Administrators and teachers just didn't really know or understand what was going on. "The kids have a way of communicating with each other without us knowing about it,'' he said. "They really have their own world."

This is meant as a defense, rather than an admission of lameness, even though after a suicide you'd think that the school would do some soul searching about why administrators, teachers, and guidance counselors didn't fully comprehend what was happening to a vulnerable student.

This professed ignorance is also factually at odds with the account of Phoebe's mother, who has said she asked the school in November whether kids were threatening her daughter and then went back to talk to school officials about Phoebe in the first week of January. Sayer's claim also doesn't line up with the accounts of students who I've talked to. They say they saw Phoebe standing outside a classroom in tears and heard her crying in the nurse's office the day she died, as some students also told the New York Times...