Fox News is reporting that two girls have been arrested in the case of Rebecca Sedwick, 12, who jumped to her death on September 9 after months of on-line bullying.
Katelyn Roman, 12, and Guadalupe Shaw, 14, were both arrested on felony charges of aggravated stalking are accused of repeatedly and maliciously harassing Sedwick from December 2012 to February 2013. The decision to arrest the two girls came after Shaw went on-line and posted an admission that she had been bullying Rebecca and that she didn't care about the girl's death.
This posting, and the fact that the girls still had access to social media, is what led Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd to arrest Shaw and Roman.
"We decided that we can't leave her out there. Who else is she going to torment, who else is she going to harass?" Sheriff Judd said at a news conference Tuesday. He added that he was distressed to find the girls were still using social media. “If we can find any charges we can bring against their parents, we will," he said.
Police are currently looking for any evidence that the parents of the bullies knew that their daughters were bullying Rebecca. If any is found, charges will be brought against them for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
That the parents are at least somewhat responsible seemed evident in the response of Shaw's mother who told ABC News that she checked her daughter's Facebook status every time she used it and said she believes her daughter's account was hacked.
This only angered police more.
"You tell me that there's not parents, who instead of taking that device and smashing it into a 1,000 pieces in front of her child, says, 'Oh, her account was hacked?' We see where the problem is," Judd said.
The bullying of Rebecca Sedwick began last year with Shaw started dating a boy Rebecca had been seeing. Shaw convinced Roman, who had been Rebecca's best friend, to join in bullying which was at first confined to physical intimidation.
The abuse eventually escalated and went on-line where it became so alarming Rebecca's mother pulled her out of the school last winter and began homeschooling her. She took away her daughter's cell phone and closed her Facebook account as well as provided her with psychiatric treatment.
This fall, Rebecca was enrolled in a new school, but the harassment continued, mostly through cellphone message applications like Ask.fm and Kik, which her mother didn’t know she was using.
On Sept. 9, the day she died, Rebecca changed her username on one application to “that dead girl,” and sent a goodbye message to several friends.
She later jumped to her death from a tower at an abandoned cement plant.
Investigators say at least 15 girls in Rebecca's social media circle were part of the bullying. Florida police are still considering pressing charges against these girls, but their parents have all cooperated with the investigation and have confiscated the girls' cell phones and computers.
“The problem is not the kids reporting, the problem is usually the adults who do not listen and follow up," said Debbie Johnston, whose son committed suicide after relentless bullying eight years ago. She is now national legislative liaison for Bully Police USA, a group that works to get antibullying laws in place.
Johnston, who helped write Florida's anti-bullying law, says parents often have huge culpability in bullying by their children.
In an article appearing in the Christian Science Monitor, Johnston said the cyberbullying that led to her son's death took place over three years, and despite the fact that the bully’s parents were notified about what he was doing to her son, they continued to give him access to the home computer.
"He killed my son as surely as if he crawled through the window, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger,” says Johnston. “And those parents loaded the gun that allowed him to do it…. They gave him the computer, gave him access, even when they knew for three years that he was hurting not just my child but others as well.”
Parents cannot be expected to police their children's internet usage at every hour of the day and night, but there are plenty of ways they can restrict their usage and/or spot signs that a child is either bullying, or being bullied. Click here for more information.
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