Teen bullying: Should it be a crime?

The local district attorney filed criminal charges against the nine teenagers whose taunts and physical abuse drove Phoebe Prince to suicide.

It came way, way too late, said Kevin Cullen in The Boston Globe, but last week “an adult authority” finally “stepped up for Phoebe Prince.” Prince, a 15-year-old Irish immigrant, hanged herself several months ago after enduring three horrific months of bullying at her Massachusetts high school. Local district attorney Betsy Scheibel took the unusual step last week of filing criminal charges against the nine teenagers—seven of them female—whose taunts and physical abuse drove Prince to suicide. Some accuse Scheibel of overreacting, said the Cape Cod Times in an editorial. Bullying, they say, is just one of the hazards of high school life, and we can’t criminalize “kids being kids.” But it’s precisely because this kind of bullying has become so widespread, and so vicious, that something has to be done. “There can be no more Phoebes.”

Will an indictment really help, though? said Mary Williams in Salon.com. Nearly every parent has seen their kids “come home in tears because of schoolyard taunts.” But how do we determine when name-calling or scuffling “crosses over into something criminal?” It makes far more sense “to head the bullying off at the pass.” Kids aren’t born with compassion, and they need to be taught how painful—and dangerous—it is to torment one another. That lesson should be repeated in classes and anti-bullying programs over and over, throughout high school, until bullies are recognized and deterred, and the bullied know they have somewhere to turn.

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