Phoebe Prince was an Irish teenager who moved from a small town in Ireland to a town in Massachusetts. In the fall of 2009, she enrolled a the local South Hadley High School. Within months, following a brief relationship with a Senior boy, Phoebe was bullied physically at school by abusive students and threatened daily with text messages.
On January 14 2011, Phoebe prince committed suicide at home.
Was there anything that could have been done to prevent her tragic death?
The father of a girl who experienced three years of bullying at the same school claimed that their complaints to the administration brought no satisfaction. It wasn't until Phoebe's death that the school started to put together an anti-bullying task force to deal with the climate of harassment and abuse at the school -- something that, in retrospect, should have been done sooner.
What is Text Message Bullying?
It is the use of mobile phones as an instrument of harassment. Bullies often use "pay as you go" mobile phones purchased over the counter of supermarkets or convenience stores to do their "dirty work." Because no proof of identity is required for the purchase of these phones, perpetrators of bullying by mobile phones are hard to trace.
According to Amy Norton of Reuters, text-message bullying is on the rise. 24 percent of over a thousand middle school and high school students surveyed in 2008 claimed that they had experienced harassment through texting.
Compared with a similar survey conducted with the same students the year before,incidents of text message bullying have risen by 14 percent.
Read more at Text Message Bullying.
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