I’m shocked and sickened by the behavior of two Florida teens, charged with aggressively stalking and bullying their 12-year-old classmate, Rebecca Sedwick.
The modern-day mean girls, 12-year-old Kaitlyn Roman and 14-year-old Guadalupe Shaw, began their harassment over a boy that both Guadalupe and Rebecca had dated while attending Crystal Lake Middle School. Death threats, taunting and physical fights toward Rebecca escalated in the months that followed. Even after she was hospitalized for an attempted suicide and left the school, the threats continued.
Only when police confiscated the girls’ phones and laptops was the true heinousness of their comments revealed.
“Nobody cares about u,” said one horrible message read.
“Drink bleach and die,” read another.
Rebecca did die in September, but not by bleach. Instead the young girl jumped to her death from an abandoned cement factory tower, after enduring months of horrendous cyberbullying.
What’s more shocking is that the girls continued mocking Rebecca even after her untimely death. A post on Guadalupe’s Facebook page read “Yes IK I bullied REBECCA nd she killed her self but IDGAF.” The final acronym translating to, “I don’t give an (expletive).”
This is disgusting.
How can such young girls have so little respect for their now dead classmate? Unsurprisingly, some news media blame the parents for their daughters’ actions.
Sure, we can all point fingers at the parents, questioning why they weren’t more proactive in their child’s online activity. However, the sad truth is that they can’t be. In a world with technology practically oozing through every nook and cranny of our lives, teens will find a way to access their precious Internet or texts. If they’re not using it at home, they are accessing it through school computers, the library or friends. And let’s be honest, keeping secrets from parents is a teenage specialty. It is, therefore, naïve to think that Guadalupe and Kaitlyn’s parents are responsible for their daughters’ behavior.
The blame lies with the girls themselves.
While parents monitoring social media interactions are important, it is even more vital that teens realize the consequences of their words, something Guadalupe and Kaitlyn rudely disregarded. Through her Facebook post, Guadalupe didn’t even try to hide her involvement with Rebecca’s death, showing she could care less about the harm of her actions.
These girls need a serious reality check, and being charged with only felony aggressive stalking just isn’t enough. According to news reports, punishments for felony aggressive stalking can range anywhere from juvenile probation to placement in a residential-commitment program for five years or until their 19th birthdays.
That’s it.
After that time period, Guadalupe and Kaitlyn are allowed to go back to their normal lives, as if nothing ever happened. This, ladies and gentlemen, is where the judicial system fails us. Guadalupe and Kaitlyn’s age protect them from being tried like adults. They are still treated like juveniles, even though their malicious acts were anything but juvenile.
In recent years, you can hardly watch the news without hearing another story about a teen committing suicide due to bullying. Just this week, a student opened fire at Sparks Middle School in Nevada, wounding two students and killing a teacher before turning the gun on himself. According to media reports, the student was a victim of bullying. Another teen, Jordan Lewis, shot himself in the chest in mid-October because he couldn’t take the bullying anymore. Deaths caused by relentless bullying are an unmistakable problem in today’s world.
As a society, how can we truly end bullying if we choose not to apply significant punishment toward those executing it? At the very least, further punishment toward Guadalupe and Kaitlyn would send a clear message—bullying is never okay.
In my mind, Guadalupe and Kaitlyn lost any right they had to being treated as juveniles the second Rebecca leapt to her death.
This was not your run-of-the-mill bullying case; it was more than name-calling. Guadalupe and Kaitlyn knowingly drove Rebecca to suicide, and they are openly not sorry about it. They should pay for their wrongdoing by serving a much harsher sentence
