"9 teens arrested in Phoebe Prince cyberbullying case" Kim LaCapria , March 29, 2010

Once again cyberbullying has resulted in commiting suicide by a teenager. Phoebe Nora.Mary Prince was an Irish teenager who moved to Massachusetts. She has commuted to suicide after she got bullied by her classmates on January 14, 2010 .
After investigations , Police announced that it has been arrested 9 suspects as below :

Sean Mulveyhill, 17, of South Hadley who is charged with statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting, criminal harassment and disturbance of a school assembly.

1.Kayla Narey, 17, of South Hadley who is charged with violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting, criminal harassment, disturbance of a school assembly.

2.Austin Renaud, 18, of Springfield who is charged with statutory rape.

3.Ashley Longe, 16, of South Hadley charged with violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting as a youthful offender.

4.Flannery Mullins, 16, of South Hadley violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting and stalking as a youthful offender.

5.Sharon Chanon Velazquez, 16, of South Hadley who is charged with violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting and stalking as a youthful offender.

and the other three person has not been named.

As you can see , cyberbullying cases are getting more serious than before in the students and teenagers. The question is that who is responsible for the death of this innocent girl ? Parents? Teachers? Police ? Suspects ? or Society?

I do believe that Parents and schools have major roles in this situation but both if them should have information and get educated. Regarding this issue a book has been published in the malaysia recently which will be reviewed in this blog in the future.........

Source : http://www.inquisitr.com/68188/phoebe-prince-arrests/

CBS News(March 29, 2010) : Alexis Pilkington, 17, of West Islip, Long Island, N.Y., killed herself after what may be been cyber-bullying.

(CBS)  Police are investigating whether cyberbullies contributed to the suicide of a teen in the Long Island, N.Y. town of West Islip. The nasty messages continued to show up online even after her death, reports CBS News Correspondent Jeff Glor. 

Soccer star Alexis Pilkington, 17, took her own life March 21 following vicious taunts on social networking sites -- which persisted postmortem on Internet tribute pages, worsening the grief of her family and friends. 

Alexis' parents downplayed the role the Internet played in her suicide, saying their daughter was in counseling before she ever signed up with FormSpringMe.com, a new social networking site, where many of the attacks appeared. 

However, Glor points out, the incident underscores the growing trend of cyberbullying. A bill aimed at preventing it is now being considered in Washington, D.C. It would make electronic communication intended to coerce, intimidate or harass a federal crime. Fifteen states have such laws, and Massachusetts is considering one. Among kids, Glor notes, a whopping 42 percent say they've been bullied online. And the relentless taunting has helped push several of them over the edge. 

It was a part of report published by CBS News online website on march 29 . As it has mentioned in the article , Alexis Pikington , a 17 year old girl has committed to suicide after being harassed in one of the most famous social network websites , formspring.com .

News argued that alexis has been attacked in the formspring.com anonymously. The question here is that why a person could be able to create a profile in a social network anonymously ? Isn't it considered as lack of security in the social network ???  And it is clear that whoever harassed or threatened this girl and forced her to commit suicide , has intentionally used this security weakness .

I do believe that this crime will be continued more and more if social network providers do not find an appropriate and effective way to control the Identities and data accuracy of their profiles. And the last interesting point is that according to the formspring.com website, this site has been awarded for its security issues !!!!!!!!!!

Please help me with your comments and notes.........

Keeley Houghton , the first prisoner related to cyber bullying in UK.....

This story is old but its interesting.Keeley Houghton is the first teenager which have been sent to prison as a Consequence of cyber bullying in the facebook. Emily Moore had committed suicide after receiving a threatening  message from keeley on facebook. This strict punishment has been determined by judge Bruce morgan.

The interesting point in this story is that keeley explained that she did not think that her messages will cause death of her friend. According to this case and other cases consequences and results of an email , message or SMS are hard to estimate and short messages can lead to horrible results.

The question here is that do this kind of punishments , especially for teenagers , can reduce the number of cyber bullying cases? 

It is commonly accepted that imprisoning teenagers has some serious side effects such as getting familiar with drugs and drug dealers. And also i think that prevention of cyber bullying need some infra structural ways instead of hard punishments. please keep leave your comments and express your different points of view in this blog......
Reference : http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/4752602.Facebook_bully_speaks_of_her_regrets_after_release_from_prison/

Emily Moore (VICTIM)

Keely Houghton                          

Shaheen Shariff and her book about cyber bullying....

I was surfing the web regarding cyber-bullying and I found
 a book with this title : 

"Cyber-bullying:  issues and solutions for the school, the classroom  and the home" This book has been published in 2008.  The author of this book is Shaheen Shareef from McGill. At the first look author's  name sounds iranian but after  googling i found out that it is not an  iranian author. anyway , it is an usable an interesting book  which will increase the knowledge about this phenomena in the society.  Price of this book os about $30 and its offered by Amazon  with free shipping. I should mention that it is not the only book in this area by  this author and there are  2 or 3 more books by shaheen shariff about cyberbullying.....