Girl’s Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies
Brian Blanco for The New York Times
A memorial for 12-year-old
Rebecca Sedwick has sprouted at the abandoned cement plant in Lakeland,
Fla., where she committed suicide.
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: September 13, 2013 88 Comments
MIAMI — The clues were buried in her bedroom. Before leaving for school
on Monday morning, Rebecca Ann Sedwick had hidden her schoolbooks under a
pile of clothes and left her cellphone behind, a rare lapse for a
12-year-old girl.
Rebecca Sedwick
Lance Speere for The New York Times
Rebecca’s mother, Tricia Norman, said she had no idea
that her daughter, who died this week, was being cyberbullied by about
15 middle-school children, a problem that first arose and was addressed
last year.
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Inside her phone’s virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik
Messenger, a cellphone application, to “That Dead Girl” and delivered a
message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a
platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central
Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County
sheriff said.
In jumping, Rebecca became one of the youngest members of a growing list
of children and teenagers apparently driven to suicide, at least in
part, after being maligned, threatened and taunted online, mostly
through a new collection of texting and photo-sharing cellphone
applications. Her suicide raises new questions about the proliferation
and popularity of these applications and Web sites among children and
the ability of parents to keep up with their children’s online
relationships.
For more than a year, Rebecca, pretty and smart, was cyberbullied by a
coterie of 15 middle-school children who urged her to kill herself, her
mother said. The Polk County sheriff’s office is investigating the role
of cyberbullying in the suicide and considering filing charges against
the middle-school students who apparently barraged Rebecca with hostile
text messages. Florida passed a law this year making it easier to bring felony charges in online bullying cases.
Rebecca was “absolutely terrorized on social media,” Sheriff Grady Judd
of Polk County said at a news conference this week.
Along with her grief, Rebecca’s mother, Tricia Norman, faces the
frustration of wondering what else she could have done. She complained
to school officials for several months about the bullying, and when
little changed, she pulled Rebecca out of school. She closed down her
daughter’s Facebook page and took her cellphone away. She changed her
number. Rebecca was so distraught in December that she began to cut
herself, so her mother had her hospitalized and got her counseling. As
best she could, Ms. Norman said, she kept tabs on Rebecca’s social media
footprint.
It all seemed to be working, she said. Rebecca appeared content at her
new school as a seventh grader. She was gearing up to audition for
chorus and was considering slipping into her cheerleading uniform once
again. But unknown to her mother, Rebecca had recently signed on to new
applications — ask.fm, and Kik and Voxer — which kick-started the messaging and bullying once again.
“I had never even heard of them; I did go through her phone but didn’t
even know,” said Ms. Norman, 42, who works in customer service. “I had
no reason to even think that anything was going on. She was laughing and
joking.”
Sheriff Judd said Rebecca had been using these messaging applications to
send and receive texts and photographs. His office showed Ms. Norman
the messages and photos, including one of Rebecca with razor blades on
her arms and cuts on her body. The texts were full of hate, her mother
said: “Why are you still alive?” “You’re ugly.”
One said, “Can u die please?” To which Rebecca responded, with a flash
of resilience, “Nope but I can live.” Her family said the bullying began
with a dispute over a boy Rebecca dated for a while. But Rebecca had
stopped seeing him, they said.
Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long
before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored
suicide. “How many Advil do you have to take to die?”
In hindsight, Ms. Norman wonders whether Rebecca kept her distress from
her family because she feared her mother might take away her cellphone
again.
“Maybe she thought she could handle it on her own,” Ms. Norman said.
It is impossible to be certain what role the online abuse may have
played in her death. But cyberbullying experts said cellphone messaging
applications are proliferating so quickly that it is increasingly
difficult for parents to keep pace with their children’s complex digital
lives.
“It’s a whole new culture, and the thing is that as adults, we don’t
know anything about it because it’s changing every single day,” said
Denise Marzullo, the chief executive of Mental Health America of
Northeast Florida in Jacksonville, who works with the schools there on
bullying issues.
No sooner has a parent deciphered Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than
his or her children have migrated to the latest frontier. “It’s all of
these small ones where all this is happening,” Ms. Marzullo said.
In Britain, a number of suicides by young people have been linked to
ask.fm, and online petitions have been started there and here to make
the site more responsive to bullying. The company ultimately responded
this year by introducing an easy-to-see button to report bullying and
saying it would hire more moderators.
“You hear about this all the time,” Ms. Norman said of cyberbullying. “I never, ever thought it would happen to me or my daughter.”
Questions have also been raised about whether Rebecca’s old school,
Crystal Lake Middle School, did enough last year to help stop the
bullying; some of it, including pushing and hitting, took place on
school grounds. The same students also appear to be involved in sending
out the hate-filled online messages away from school, something schools
can also address.
Nancy Woolcock, the assistant superintendent in charge of antibullying
programs for Polk County Schools, said the school received one bullying
complaint from Rebecca and her mother in December about traditional
bullying, not cyberbullying. After law enforcement investigated,
Rebecca’s class schedule was changed. Ms. Woolcock said the school also
has an extensive antibullying campaign and takes reports seriously.
But Ms. Norman said the school should have done more. Officials told her
that Rebecca would receive an escort as she switched classes, but that
did not happen, she said.
Rebecca never boarded her school bus on Monday morning. She made her way
to the abandoned Cemex plant about 10 minutes away from her modest
mobile home; the plant was a place she had used as a getaway a few times
when she wanted to vanish. Somehow, she got past the high chain-link
fence topped with barbed wire, which is now a memorial, with teddy
bears, candles and balloons. She climbed a tower and then jumped.
“Don’t ignore your kids,” Ms. Norman said, “even if they seem fine.”
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