Phoebe Prince: Victim of Bullycide -- or of a Deeper Problem?

The suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince in South Hadley, Mass., in January has shone a white hot light on bullying -- in particular, cyber bullying -- perhaps the most venal bullying of all because it's viral and it's faceless. A beautiful girl with a Mona Lisa mien is dead. The nation is outraged, and prosecutors are going after six of her classmates with a vengeance.


The message is clear: Bullying must stop, and school officials, you're on notice, too. Crack down, or we'll see you in court.

From most accounts, the get-tough message is playing well in South Hadley and in Peoria, and it's certainly being hailed online.

But along with the crackdown has come a certain lynch-mob atmosphere, and the truth is six kids are being tried and convicted before the facts are in.

Another painful truth in the death of Phoebe Prince: No one makes you kill yourself.

By now, most are familiar with the basics of the Prince case: She immigrated to America from County Clare, Ireland, with her mother and sister, and started at South Hadley High School last fall. Very pretty, with a lovely Irish lilt, Prince apparently had no problems fitting in, at first. She dated a senior star player on the football team, and in December, she briefly dated another popular boy. After that, jealous girlfriends of the boys harassed Prince relentlessly, according to the district attorney, threatening to "beat her up," calling her an "Irish slut" and leaving ugly messages about her on Facebook. On Jan. 14, as Prince walked home, kids in a car yelled taunts at her and threw an empty drink container at her. Later that day, Prince hung herself in a closet.

Her suicide rocked the community. A young girl, tormented to death, right under their noses. Why hadn't school officials done something to stop the bullying, parents demanded.

"The Mean Girls who tortured Phoebe remain in school, defiant, unscathed," wrote Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen. Barb Shelly of the Kansas City Star blamed school officials "who failed to save the new girl from the mean girls, and the bullies from themselves."

District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel charged the teenagers with criminal harassment and stalking, and the two boys with statutory rape, saying the bullying was "designed to humiliate [Prince] and to make it impossible for her to remain at school. The bullying, for her, became intolerable."

The media pile-on continues. Prince's photo stares out from this week's April 26 cover of People magazine. "Phoebe Prince, Her Final Days: Bullied to Death? The Teenager's Cry for Help . . . New Details About the Accused 'Mean Girls.' "

Meanwhile, my list of questions grows. Why is this case feeling more every day like the media in search of a trend -- i.e., bullycide, death by bullying? Was mental health counseling readily available to Prince? What is behind the statement by the Prince family spokesperson that Phoebe also had a problem with bullies in Ireland? What other factors could have made Prince depressed? Being called "Irish slut" and "Irish whore" is no picnic, but in this age of casual slurs, 24/7 Internet bile and ubiquitous F-bombs, it's hard to understand how those terms could have pushed Prince over the brink.

I'm also thinking of that old biblical saying about the human condition: The poor will always be with us. Maybe the same can be said of bullies. Today, you can find adult bullies by the millions on the Internet. And we expect kids won't follow suit?

Until aggression no longer factors in human evolution, you have to wonder if the best offense may be a good defense. Wouldn't the effort to prosecute bullies be better spent inoculating our kids against cruel people, arming them with titanium-strength self-worth and teaching them why bullying is always about the bully, not the bullied?

Experts are cautious.

Verbal and cyber bullying are indeed potent and dangerous weapons, and the relationship between bullying and suicide is significant, said Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington. "Data indicate there is a heightened risk for suicide among those who are bullied, as well those who bully," he said.

"Bullies have often been bullied themselves," Berman noted. "They have a damaged sense of self," which often triggers depression and in some cases, progresses to suicidal thinking.

The Internet is their oyster, said Berman. Unfortunately, their targets have much less opportunity to fight back online, "and it induces a sense of helplessness and hopelessness."

How much cyberbullying Prince endured is unclear. Scheibel, the district attorney, said Facebook and Craigslist were presenting "significant obstacles" in obtaining Prince's online exchanges, and Scheibel slammed the companies for their "inexplicable lack of cooperation."

But a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice indicates cyberbullying has eclipsed old-fashioned physical bullying, which declined 7 percent from 2003 to 2008. At the same time, "more than 43 percent of teens report being victims of cyberbullying," according to The Reno Gazette Journal. Michelle Boykins, director of communications for the National Crime Prevention Council, told the newspaper: "We are worried about the pervasive growth of cyberbullying among our young people. The online assault of our kids through cyberbullying hurts every bit as much as a fist and can be equally damaging."

Verbal bullying also appears to be escalating.

Increasingly, we hear of stories like that of Eric Mohat, 17, of Mentor, Ohio, who killed himself in March 2007 after he "was told by a bully, 'Eric, why don't you go home and shoot yourself? It's not like anybody would care,' " Mohat's mother told CBS News. The Mohats sued the school, saying officials were aware of the bullying but failed to take action.

Other stories of bullycide, most told in heartbreaking detail by the parents, are posted at www.jaredstory.com.
If only we could turn back the clock to simpler times, as Gov. Patrick Deval of Massachusetts suggested, "when we had a very strong sense of community." Deval grew up in Chicago, and "if you messed up down the street in front of Ms. Jones, she would straighten you out as if you were hers, then call home so you got it two times," he said. "There's something about that responsibility that adults took for all the children that we've got to recapture."

Will prosecuting bullying, as Massachusetts is doing, help reduce the number of bullycides? Time will tell.

But criminalizing bullying is a slippery slope, warns Ann Althouse of the University of Wisconsin Law School. "Are you ready to charge everyone who bullies?" she asked.

In a discussion with Slate's Emily Bazelon at New York Times Bloggingheads, Althouse suggested Phoebe Prince could have had family problems, or was afflicted with ongoing depression, and that prosecuting her bullies was an overreaction.

"Teens are mean to each other. . . . [but] they don't go home and commit suicide," she said.

Blaming bullies for Prince's death is too pat, Althouse said. "To have a tight cause and effect, I'm a little suspicious of that," she said. "And I think the people who love that girl have reason to embrace the idea that mean people made her do it, but life is more complex than that. "

Ultimately, Althouse believes that when a person takes a life -- even if it's his or her own life -- that person cannot lay the blame on anyone else.

"If you commit a murder, you don't get to say, 'Oh, well, people made my life hell and I had reason to do it.' You're still a murderer," Althouse said. "The people who made your life difficult, they didn't kill you. You killed yourself."