I am perfectly aware that the law is not elastic. I know that it cannot bend to suit every case, every circumstance, every instance where someone deserves to pay for what they’ve done. I can see, yes, that the concept of “cyber-bullying” is a sketchy topic to draw thick black marker lines around, a difficult crime to accurately pinpoint, but a crime nonetheless. Yes, there’s room for error. There’s room for error in any and all human-instituted laws and regulations, room for reasonable error, but under no circumstances, none whatsoever, should “reasonable error” ever result in suicide.
http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext?nxd_id=285297
She was only fourteen; a freshman attending high school in Spencerport, NY. Her peers said she was nice, pretty, smart, treated everyone around her well. Is that true? I don’t know. I didn’t know her. But I don’t think it matters, either. She deserves the same amount of respect and mourning as anyone else who dies at such a young age, regardless of who she was when she was alive. It’s a shame.
What really the police gets me, though, about the whole thing, is the response from the local authorities. Despite the fact that in another news broadcast that every single kid at her school they interviewed said her death had to do with bullying, the police still manage to stand there and say that “there is no clear or solid evidence directing us to the point where this is a hate crime, bullying, or cyber bullying; things may change but nothing is pushing us in a direction at this time.” Really? Really, ladies and gentlemen? Hundreds of comments on each post on her memorial page on Facebook regarding how she was being harassed doesn’t qualify as “clear or solid evidence”? Direct witness accounts from her fellow students commenting on how she was bullied, that’s not “clear or solid evidence”? Oh, I’m sorry. I guess the police are just waiting for someone to walk into the police department, like, “Hey, what’s up? I harassed Cameron pretty consistently, right up ’till she did herself in. Well, I guess you can cuff me now, huh?” Likely story.
After her death, as previously mentioned, a memorial page was set up for Cameron on Facebook, drawing in thousands of comments and likes from around the area and around the world. Evidently, and some of these posts can still be seen on the page, a group of “unidentified individuals”, most likely kids at her school, made fake profiles and continued to post hateful comments on her memorial page. The police mentioned this nowhere in any of their interviews and press conferences. Hm. I guess they just forgot that bit.
If I’m not mistaken, an IP scan can be run, by the police, to trace back those fake profiles to the computers they were made from. Now, I know that the Facebook terms of use may have some legal issues with this, so I won’t expand on why they should or shouldn’t be doing it (though of course they should), but that’s entirely different from not informing the public of the fact that those comments and profiles were there.
This “hush hush” policy regarding bullying has gone too far. There is a huge problem when the number one priority of the local authorities is to “quell rumours” (which are hardly rumours) rather than trying to validate or invalidate them.
I’ll name no names and give no details for the family’s sake, but I know of someone, a boy I believe a year older than Cameron who killed himself recently, due to bullying. The last text message he received before he pulled the trigger was, “Are you still alive?” plus or minus text speak. The police, who could just so easily have talked to the boy who sent that text message, told his parents what he did, did nothing. They didn’t so much as mention this boy’s name during the course of the investigation. At this boy’s school, the school did nothing, the police did nothing, and no one will talk about it.
So how can they expect this to stop?
A Study of the Everyday Curiosities of Human Behaviour 