Cyber Crime

Cyber Crime
Her principal at South Hadley High School described 15-year-old Phoebe Prince as smart and charming. Phoebe’s mother spoke highly of her daughter noting how beautiful, intelligent, and sensitive she was. Phoebe moved to Massachusetts with her sister Lauren and her mother Anne so they could catch a break from Ireland. Phoebe was enrolled at South Hadley High School and shortly after she started dating a star football player. A group of girls who referred to themselves as the “untouchable mean girls” thought Phoebe didn’t know her place, so they took it upon themselves to teach her it. Phoebe was slandered with insults while she was at school, things would be thrown at her, and her books would get whacked out of her hands constantly. Phoebe was humiliated on social networking sites, and also received threatening text messages.
Phoebe’s mother didn’t fail to mention Phoebe’s past with depression on the enrollment paperwork for South Hadley High. Despite the High School having knowledge of her depression, it took three months after the start of classes for a counselor to see Phoebe and discuss her depression (Cullen, 2011). On the night of January 13th, 2010 Phoebe met with her therapist. No one saw it coming. As Phoebe walked home from school the next day, a red-bull soda can was hurled in her direction. This was the breaking point. Her 12-year-old sister would later find Phoebe hanging in a stairwell.
Cyber-bullying is a growing problem that affects millions of teens throughout the world and is beginning to spiral out of control. With cyber-space expanding and new social network sites being created, there’s more room for cyber-bullying to happen. This issue has gotten so bad that The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it a public-health problem (Billitteri, 2008). Billitteri introduces recent researches that were done on cyber-bullying:
A third of teens that use the Internet said they’d experienced some kind of online harassment….