Sounds like Australia is a lot rougher place than America if you learned all that before 10. Then again maybe my parents didn't want me worrying about the Cuban Missie crises and kept me away from news.

As to blaming the internet, if you read some other news reports is gets obvious that the people posting the stuff at first weren't half way around the globe. They were in her school and the stuff went viral.

Put yourself into a 14 year old girl at the onset of puberty with the mood swings that dose of hormones brings on, with all the insecurity and desperate need to fit in, not be different and picked on. Now you see a post calling you a slut and a whore. You see the hit counter is in the tens of thousands, everyone in the whole world has seen it, except your parents. Next day at school your classmates are pointing fingers and calling you those names and quoting the post. You post a rebutal, but bullies being bullies they smell blood in the water like a shark and post more and more. The hit counter just keeps going up. Your life is over.

It doesn't matter if she stops looking at the posts. Her classmates are looking at the posts! and reminding her of them!

There is a lot of blame to go around here. But the internet has facilitated the rapid scurrilous distribution of rumors. It must be to blame, at least in part.

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Gary, I knew what suicide was before my age reached double digits, not because of personal experience, but from reading stories in the newspapers, the TV news and fiction. Before I was 10 I knew several different methods whereby a person could take themselves out. These included tablets, poison, rope and guns.

I see the problem here is that it's too easy to blame the internet rather than looking at the true underlying causes. This is my main point here, Don't blame the internet for every thing wrong with the planet. Every generation has had it's whipping boy for the evils of the world. In the 1950's it was Rock and Roll, in the 60's it was hippies, in the 70's and 80's it was Heavy Metal and today the World Wide Web.

You refer to being bullied when young. But this was probably actual, physical, "hands on" bullying. In school I got the occasional defamatory note left on my desk, but I did have a fair idea who put it there. In the online situation the protagonist could be anywhere in the world.

I also see what goes on with my 17 year old grand daughter and her Facebook account. At times her and her friends have threads with 40+ posts on them and 90% of them being extremely insulting, in the next thread the same people are telling each other what wonderful people they are and how much they love each other.

This is just the way her and her friends carry on, yet if anyone outside her group read the insults thread they would think they had fallen into the middle of WW III.

I'm fully aware of the effects of physical bullying and totally agree with you on that. It's that I just don't believe that anonymous insults received on a site that you voluntarily visit, knowing what you will find there, is enough to cause depression deep enough for a person to kill themselves. As I keep saying, the reasons have to be much deeper than the story mentions and the internet is just a convenient scape goat. I do know that a family break up, particularly if it's a nasty one, can have disastrous effects on the children and in this situation I strongly suspect that this would be the root cause, but as I'm a long way from this case I won't pontificate too much on it.

There is also the fact that young teenagers, particularly girls in the throes of puberty, suffer from the wildest of mood swings, even if they live in the most loving and stable home. This has to be taken into consideration as a contributing factor if she was already suffering from depression.

Like you I was always the last one picked, at times I couldn't even make reserve "Orange Boy" (the one who took the oranges out to the team at half time) but as I was fully aware of my sporting capabilities there was no way I could really take offence. :)

T.A.

Edited for grammar and clarity.

TA

I'm sure the rest of the story is that everyone at school was telling her what was posted. How the "in clique" was dissing her. At 14 years old that is very powerful stuff. Especially if your friends are doing it. Even more so if you have other things going on in your life.

I got bullied and teased. Always the last one picked for the team. Heard the cutting remarks. Hurt like hell. Forty five years later it still smarts and slightly affects me, there is some defense mechanisms and rage under the surface that shouldn't be there, but I can keep it under control today. Must, I post in politics and haven't gotten a time out.

No suicide didn't cross my mind. Don't think I even knew what that was. But if I had and had a method ... the internet brings that to kids today. Don't tell me that is a good thing.

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Of course there is more to the story. But from all indications the cyber-bullying was probably just the last straw.

Humpty Dumpty was pushed. Yes she was an egg and she did sit on that wall.
But she was still pushed.

I disagree. "Cyber Bullying" is just a convenient target to put the blame on, and affixing blame on the easiest target is the name of the game. This way, people don't have to look too deeply for the real cause.

Over the years there has been several of my children's and grandchildren's friends kill themselves. This was before the internet, so on line insults can be disregarded. The common factor was they all came from broken homes. But as it is politically incorrect these days to suggest the deepness of the effect this can have on the children, particularly in their early teens, another cause has to be found, and the person's on line activities are the easiest target. Not that long ago, in a situation like this, the blame would have fallen on the type of music she was listening too, particularly if it was Heavy Metal. This way the parents are absolved from any contributing factor to the child's depression.

If getting involved in an on line flame war could really cause depression severe enough for a person to neck themselves, the on line population would be half of what it is today.

T.A.

Of course there is more to the story. But from all indications the cyber-bullying was probably just the last straw.

Humpty Dumpty was pushed. Yes she was an egg and she did sit on that wall.
But she was still pushed.

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Janice

My first question is. If the bullying on the site was getting to her, why did she keep going there ?

This is an easy question to ask, but if you are not in her shoes you have no clue what was going on her mind. Obviously rational thought was not the overriding process. Tragedy caused by the human condition.

Read the rest of my post. As I said, I think it very unlikely that the so called "cyber bullying" was the real reason she committed suicide.

There is a lot more to this story than has been published.

T.A.

My first question is. If the bullying on the site was getting to her, why did she keep going there ?

This is an easy question to ask, but if you are not in her shoes you have no clue what was going on her mind. Obviously rational thought was not the overriding process. Tragedy caused by the human condition.

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I think stories like this say more about the person themselves than the trolls.

My first question is. If the bullying on the site was getting to her, why did she keep going there ?

"Cyber Bullying" is not like being physically bullied. To avoid it all you have to do is not visit the site !! If you visit the site with full knowledge of what goes on there, then you should have shoulders broad enough to handle it. Such anonymous messages have the same status as the graffiti on the walls of public toilets, so why take them seriously ?

There is obviously more to this story than has been reported. Before waving my hands in "shock, horror, ban the site" mode, the first thing I would want to see is the contents of her Outbox. The girl was obviously suffering from depression, possibly over the breakup of her parents and was blaming herself for the breakup. In such a state it's quite possible she was sending the messages to herself. It's also possible she was sending similar anonymous messages to others, but the "real" truth is something we'll never know.

FWIW, I can talk from experience, I was physically bullied during my first two years of high school including being "Royal Flushed" a couple of times, but at no stage did I think of committing suicide. Handling on line insults is much easier, that's what the Delete key is for.

T.A.

Not the first
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier
not the last

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Another sad indicment of today's society. Technology is destroying the family unit, if it hasn't already done so.

How many times have we all heard that the Internet is too big to police?

Yet we see companies & individuals providing programs/apps to keep people in constant touch with the only thought in their heads is to make as much profit as possible. Understandable I suppose, but if they have the intelligence to provide such programs/apps, then there has to be somebody that is capable of providing security/logging & tracability of all users.

Hmmn, too costly/troublesome to do so?

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