Documents detail the last days of Phoebe Prince before suicide from bullying

[alp227]

The New York Times reports:

Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old who killed herself after relentless taunting, spent her final days in fear of girls who had threatened to beat her up, according to the first official accounts released in a case in Massachusetts that gained wide attention last week, when six students were charged with felonies.

Ms. Prince, who entered South Hadley High last fall after moving from Ireland, was in emotional torment after weeks of being called an “Irish slut” and other names, and also became increasingly worried about the loudly voiced physical threats, students told investigators. She told a friend that she was “not a tough girl” and “would not know how to fight,” and at one point she asked friends to surround her as she walked in the hall.

The documents were prepared by the district attorney for the Northwestern District in Massachusetts in support of charges against three 16-year-old students. They provide the first detailed accounts of verbal abuse and physical threats that prosecutors say were heaped upon Ms. Prince right up to the afternoon of Jan. 14, when she walked home crying and hanged herself from a stairwell.

They also describe evidence suggesting that some teachers and administrators had known for weeks about the harassment but failed to stop it, a contention that school officials have disputed.

The 40 pages of documents summarize the alleged crimes of the three girls who were arraigned Thursday in Hadley — Ashley Longe, Flannery Mullins and Sharon Chanon Velazquez. They have been charged as youthful offenders with felonies including violation of civil rights and stalking, and have also been charged with similar crimes under juvenile laws. Three other students — Sean Mulveyhill, 17, Kayla Narey, 17, and Austin Renaud, 18 — have been charged as adults, including charges of statutory rape against the two male students. The accused students have pleaded not guilty.

More: "Documents Detail a Girl’s Final Days of Bullying"

"Irish slut"?!?! I've never heard of that kind of racist stereotype; probably her tormentors were just plain racist or full of hate in general.

"Mullins"? "Mulveyhill"? These sound Irish or English in origin. This makes this bullying case all the much worse in that one or two of her tormentors were perhaps some self-hating British or Irish youth. I'm not gonna play the race card here; anyone who torments an innocent teen (citizen or immigrant) like that is a monster. Phoebe Prince was actually born in England but moved to Ireland before immigrating to the US.

Finally, as school admin is accused of ignoring what they knew about the harassment I'd like to show you a couple of other recent posts on DU about cases where leadership knew of issues but did nothing about them.

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent

Toyota Documents Show It Knew of Pedal Flaws in 2006 (3 1/2 years before it recalled cars and trucks

What is WRONG with the world these days? ARGH :mad: :puke: :banghead:

[virgogal]

1. Irish isn't a "race".

[Tansy_Gold]

2. Race being a social construction, yes, Irish was at one time a race

And it wasn't a white one.

[virgogal]

3. Phoebe Prince hardly would fall into that category. Calling her tormentors

racists is ridiculous.

[Tansy_Gold]

5. Actually, no it's not ridiculous

But that's only if you accept "race" as a construction that is not based on physical features alone but rather on other attributes that use race as a convenient marker.

I have two acquaintances, women in their 60s, blonde and blue-eyed, with decidedly English last names (not married names). Both frequently refer to themselves as "women of color" because they are natives of Buenos Aires and therefore Latinas, descended from four or five generations of mixed English and German descent living in Argentina. They would no more claim Mediterranean or indigenous biological background than they would claim to be able to fly. Indeed, they would be horrified. Nor would they ordinarily choose to mix socially with people of Mexican heritage (I live in Arizona) because . . . they simply wouldn't. They are very proud of their distinctly Nordic appearance, because it makes them somehow "superior" to those who are darker, yet. . . . they also consider themselves women of color. Go figure.

Race, racism, and racist are all based on something that really doesn't exist the way we think it does. So classifying "Irish" as a race is no more ridiculous than classifying any other group as a race. It's all in what you say it is.


Tansy Gold

[HipChick]

6. not sure what you are trying to say..

They are very proud of their distinctly Nordic appearance, because it makes them somehow "superior" to those who are darker, yet. . . . they also consider themselves women of color. Go figure.
huh?

but you are talking teenage mindsets here..my cousins moved to the US when they were 9 and 10 from the UK, and were without mercy picked on,bullied and teased because they spoke perfect British English..within a couple of years - they sounded like they were born and raised in the Bronx - they purposely sought to drop their British accents so they could fit in with their peers, and by the time they changed schools a few more times - they began to be accepted..

[Tansy_Gold]

7. "Race" is what we make it to be

My two acquaintances are no more "women of color" in the generally accepted sense than Cindy McCain is. Maybe even less so. But they choose to fit themselves into a "racial" category that biologically they have no connection to. In other words, race is whatever they want it to be for their own purposes. Do they consider themselves "white"? Yes. Do they consider themselves also to be "women of color"? Yes. Is the whole thing contradictory? Absolutely. And is it also racist? You betcha.

The teens who bullied Phoebe Prince, who used the term "Irish slut," were being racist because, even as teen-agers who don't understand the theoretical concepts behind it, they were categorizing her as an other, an outsider, a "not one of us." And by using an ethnic designation -- because terms like "mick" no longer are in common parlance -- her otherness became racial. They used her ethnic/linguistic/whatever physical characteristics to mark her "race," but those characteristics really had nothing to do with it.

Here's another example of how "race" is based not on physical characteristics or country of origin or anything else but rather on how we define "the other." When I was in high school, summer of 1963, I had a boyfriend who was your classic tall, dark, and handsome. Black curly hair, gorgeous summer tan. My mother, discussing him with a neighbor, expressed the opinion that she thought he was, well, you know, just a little too dark, if you get my drift. The neighbor, who happened to belong to the same church as the young man's parents, assured my mother that all was fine. He was Italian, but had been adopted by parents with an Anglo-Saxon last name. My mother breathed a sigh of relief.

Did being Italian make him any lighter skinned? No. It didn't make his hair any less curly. But what it did do was change my mother's attitude. SHE had created his "race," first as not-quite-white and then as white-enough, not on his physical characteristics but on some other concept.

I know this is a long dissertation on race for a discussion board. Sorry.


TG

[provis99]

8. ugh, they gave it up for a Bronx accent????

Anybody showing up in Mississippi with a Bronx accent would be tarred and feathered, and shipped up to Tennessee. Ugh, Bronxian is the worst accent in America. All of that "hey youse" and "fuck" every third word. Ick.:scared:

[Roon]

12. I have a friend whose mother was fired from the bronx zoo

for having too heavy of a bronx accent.

[cali]

16. this had zip all to do with racism.

it had lots to do with Phoebe Prince being a very pretty girl.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[KT2000]

9. This young lady was cute

and had an accent the boys probably found cute. Her tormentors were jealous and wanted her out of the way. Once it became the "in" thing to do for the followers, this girl was doomed.

I have long suspected that there are some in teaching and school administration who psychologically align themselves with the students in the cool crowd and become followers to them. They did not make the leap to adulthood and seem to be frozen in the high school social order. They make me sick.

[Tsiyu]

14. This is my thought as well - pure jealousy

What a darling world, when kids get sucked into this frenzy of competition - for the grade, for the boy, for popularity - and then set out to destroy anything that seems threatening to their goal.

What a sick, fucked-up, twisted world our children experience.

Imagine if they had parents who taught them how to befriend and care for strangers...


What's that saying?


"be careful to entertain strangers..."

[Gwendolyn]

10. Good lord, you've been sheltered. Ethnic slurs have been used to torment school kids since forever.

Obviously I won't list the slurs here but no one is exempt. German, Irish, Italian, Greek, Hispanic ... most kids who live in ethnically diverse areas know what it's like to be picked on because of your family tree. Since this girl had an accent, I'll be they were ABSOLUTELY relentless.

[Roon]

11. and at one point she asked friends to surround her as she walked in the hall.

This brought tears to my eyes.

[Kievan Rus]

13. Many members of the "in crowd" at my suburban high school...

were avowed racists and no strangers to the n-word.

They were all big on anti-Arab racism in the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks. It's not because they were upset about what happened and drank the Freeper koolaid on Arab-bashing...on that fateful day, I clearly remember a good deal of them couldn't have cared less that the Twin Towers collapsed and the Pentagon was on fire, and were more interested in their asinine gossip prattle. They were just looking for something else to hate...anything that wasn't like them.

[Quantess]

15. Mullins & Mulveyhill didn't consider their own genealogy when calling her an "Irish Slut".

Ethnic consistency wasn't the point. Intimidation and Mean spirited humilitation was. They found something easy to make fun of --her accent. If she had a German accent, they would have called her a "German Slut". Those horrible teens made it a point to focus on whatever it was that made her different.