Teen bullying: Should it be a crime?

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.

Good luck with that, said The Providence Journal-Bulletin. Thanks to the Internet, social-networking sites like Facebook in particular, the gossip and nastiness that were always part of teenage life have become a deafening, 24-hour echo chamber. For too many teenagers like Phoebe, life has acquired a “Lord of the Flies atmosphere of brutality” that they can’t escape, even at home. Please note that in William Golding’s novel, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, the moral chaos on the island is a direct result of the absence of adults. What teens need most of all, in their years of self-absorbed madness, is “an invisible umbilical cord” that connects them “to a mature conscience.” Today’s busy parents would prefer to rely on schools and teachers to civilize their kids, or to blame the Internet and society for corrupting them. But when Phoebe Prince was being tortured to the point of despair, “where were the parents?”

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