Story from Multiple Eyes

The gist of the story is, Phoebe an Irish girl moved to the U.S, Massachusetts last year and started school there. She was incredibly pretty and smart and coupled with the fact that she is new and her lilting Irish accent, made her a hit among the boys. She dated briefly a football player who's a senior there which causes the ire of the popular older girls in the school. Slurs hurled, harassed constantly and stalked in real life and in the Facebook. One day in January after a Red Bull can was thrown at her direction, she probably think she had enough and ended her life by hanging herself with a scarf in her closet.

And these girls that meted out these bullying obviously born without conscience, continue to terrorize her in her death and left hurtful vicious comments on her Facebook memorial page.

And that last act that appalled me. Girls can be very cruel. But so cruel to the point of you are not sorry at all when someone is dead, and write "Accomplished" in her memorial page. It is incomprehensible.

Just so you know, bullying is not constrained to just physically harassing a person. It can be by verbally abusing them, spreading rumours and isolating the person. While I have to freely admit that some girls are prone to talk shits about people, there are some people that can go to the extreme that hurt the most.

I would say I have been both the giving and receiving end of this type of things.

In secondary school, while not really popular, I do hang about in the popular groups. And sometimes the things young girls think as justice are actually bullying. Openly laughing at the people who are different than us, played tricks on the targeted girls (e.g. give letters to the girls supposedly penned by a some guy or even forced a guy to join in our idiotic plan and asked the girl to meet this guy because he like her, which he will then string along and gave us the letters for our amusement. Damn, we were evil bitches) And usually the worst one is where everyone is not allow or do not want to talk or associate with the person. I would say that the worst one because like I said, I had experience both the receving and giving end of the sticks plus minus some other things I talked about earlier. Those can break a girl spirit. 

The thing is all that I had done above, some mean, some are done in good fun , all of us know there is a line somewhere. Someone would have a guilty conscience and remind the others to stop doing this, its killing the other person. And we stopped. We even apologized, to some. And when I got the receiving end of the bullying, it was hellish. It was hellish for me morning and night. I become bitter, and distrustful to everyone. Its hard. I like to think of it as karma, but I do also think I was never that bad. But maybe to the person I openly sneered at, I was that bad too. Who knows? However while the silent treatment and sneering continues, I just go on and take action to go and remove myself somewhere else for respite. Many other people do not have these options. I guess Phoebe believed she does not have these options to and she is much more younger and vulnerable. And the bullying in the western world is more terrible than what we Asians counterpart experience.

I only remembered once when I was in Australia, in my class there was a big bully. He terrorized the lower grades (grade 1,2,3 also known as standard in our Malaysian school system) in the school. I remembered he will not hesitate to give a blow or a punch to anyone even without reasons. The schoolchildren whispered around that he have older brothers who beat people up too, so nobody dare messes with him. There was a particular incident, I can't remember what had happened to cause the bully to act angrily toward this boy, but it was the first time I seen him in his full blown rage. We were lining up to go into class, the bully pummeled the boy to the ground and with flaming cheeks he casually dragged the poor boy by the hair into the nearby woods to I guess beat the hell out of him even more. Everyone was dumbstruck and silent and nobody dare to say anything. This was happening when I was eight. Imagine the violence if say, we were 15 at the time. 

What I guess I am trying to say is, the physical does hurt. It hurt as much as the verbal abuse. While boys usually more prone to receive the physical threat of bullying, the girls are usually attacked verbally or shamed. And today generation are now growing up with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Blog even. The ability to update to thousand of people in your network in a blink, the attack may even be more devastating. The ability to spread rumours to wide reaching audience with the supposed thinking it can be anonymous, and sensationalized and you won't be in any trouble. Before this name smear maybe contained to one area, but with the Internet, everything changed. I do not have to explain more, many of you are Internet savvy enough to know the truth.

Right now the bully are being charged and facing punishment, but many argue is that enough? What about the adults, the teachers and the parents who let the bully continue to terrorize. Its hard to see what had gone wrong. Usually a person who like to hit somebody is associated with parents that hit their kids too. But blaming and sneering and rumour spreading. Many come from respectable background with conscientious parents. Maybe it comes to where does the blame end and what you are going to do about it to make sure your children or nephews or nieces grow up to be a people without malice or at the very least know when to stop and what is right and what is wrong