Real Life Mean Girls

The parents in a Massachusetts town are reacting the recent suicide of Phoebe Prince who killed her two weeks after she was being cyber bullied by a group of true life “mean girls.” Prince was a 15 year old female whose family had recently moved to Massachusetts from Ireland. Police are not releasing a lot of information about why Prince hung herself, but it is known that she was being cyber bullied from a group of girls over a boy. Bullying is becoming more extreme now because of all the different ways of contacting the person. Bullying simply does not just take place in the schools, but online through sites such as Facebook and also through text messages. The bullying of Prince was so extreme that even after she took her own life, the girls who had been taunting her continued to leave her message on her Facebook.
South Hadley School, where Prince had been attending, had a meeting for the parents where a lot of them stood up to voice their opinion on what had happened. They were upset to say the least, they did not feel that the situation had been handled the right way. One parent even said that while he is upset at the girls who caused the problem, he is also upset with the parents to be raising such “monsters.” It is the parents job to monitor what their children are doing and this is something that the parents should have taken control over. Other parents stood up and talked about the stories of their own children who were dealing with the same kind of bullying in the school. One of the most striking things that the was reported was that there were more students who wanted to talk about what had happened, but they were scared of what the group of “mean girls” would do to them if they spoke out. Another thing that was incomprehensible to me was that some of states had a bullying protection, but North Dakota was one that did not.
This story is important because it really shows how prominent cyber bullying has become. It was especially close to me because I am going into teaching and if I had to sit back and watch this bullying happen with little retribution, it would be extremely hard for me. I feel that every state needs to enforce an anti-bullying act to protect our children from the cyber bullying. There is a website that contains information about cyber bullying and what to do if you are being bullied or if your child is being bullying. It contains signs to look for if you think your child may be being bullied. This is just such an important issue and a young girl, one of many, lost her life because she felt she had nothing else to do to escape the bullying.