9 Teens Charged in Girl’s Bullying
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Jim Liebelt Jim Liebelt's Blog
- Updated Mar 30, 2010
Parents should also be mindful of
potential consequences of bullying, for both the bullied and the bully.
Parents who are aware that their child is being bullied or is bullying,
should take action to intervene.
With sharp words and
a strikingly aggressive prosecutorial stance, authorities yesterday
spelled out a litany of charges against nine teenagers accused of
subjecting 15-year-old South Hadley student Phoebe Prince to months of
tortuous harassment before she hanged herself in a stairwell at home.
Northwestern
District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who outlined the charges, also
faulted officials at South Hadley High School, saying her investigation
determined the girl's harassment had been "common knowledge,''
contradicting administrators' previous assertions that they had been
unaware of problems until after her death.
Scheibel described in
painful detail Prince's last day at school, saying that her
investigation found the Irish immigrant was taunted in the hallways and
bombarded with vulgar insults. As she studied in the library during
lunch, the accused students allegedly hounded her openly while other
students and a teacher looked on. The witnesses alerted school
administrators only after her death.
"It appears that Phoebe's
death on Jan. 14 followed a tortuous day for her, in which she was
subjected to verbal harassment and threatened physical abuse,'' Scheibel
said. "The events were not isolated, but the culmination of a
nearly-three month campaign of verbally assaultive behavior and threats
of physical harm.''
The nature of the charges — ranging from criminal harassment and civil rights violations to stalking and statutory rape — hints at a forceful strategy of taking many legal avenues in the pursuit of convictions, legal specialists said.
The vast majority of the bullying took place during the school day, Scheibel said, and online harassment played a secondary role.
Source:
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/03/30/da_charges_9_teens_faults_school_officials_in_s_hadley_bullying_case/