Social 9-Year-Old Kills Herself after Bullies Mocked Her for Having a White Friend

Alternatively, they get destroyed by them and their life is ruined.

There’s a big difference between letting/teaching kids how to solve minor “school yard disputes” , and harassing a child or teen to the point where they’d rather hang themselves from a noose than go to school the next day. The latter situation should always be aggressively intervened in by the adults around imo.
 
Where the hell were the adults in all of this?

The parents, teachers, administrators etc....no one did anything?

They didn’t know that this little girl was getting incessantly harassed for a year?

Makes me sick.
They knew according to the mom. But I don't think most adults really grasp how different it is from when we were kids.
 
Innocence lost.

Kids are some of the cruelest people out there.

In some ways, they just don’t know any better, but nevertheless... downright heartless at times.

RIP.
 
The fact that a 9 year old even had the concept of suicide in mind as a potential reality scares me. When I was 9 years old the idea of suicide was such a foreign concept that it never would have popped into my head no matter what happened. How did we get to the point where elementary school kids are committing suicides? Has this always happened, and I just didn't know about it?

Maybe it is kind of like the D.A.R.E program? Rather than deter kids from drugs, it only gave them information about drugs to peek their interests.

Similarly, with all the anti-bullying awareness that goes on within schools/social media, and society in general, story like this get a lot of attention and are highlighted in these anti-bullying campaigns. So for a little girl who has been exposed to these ideas through bullying, feels that it is the only way to escape bullying. To some degree anyways.

I dunno.
 
There’s a big difference between letting/teaching kids how to solve minor “school yard disputes” , and harassing a child or teen to the point where they’d rather hang themselves from a noose than go to school the next day. The latter situation should always be aggressively intervened in by the adults around imo.
Very true. There's such a massive discrepancy between teaching yourchild how to be assertive and stick up for themselves, and willfully exposing them to trauma, abuse and manipulation at an emotionally vulnerable state in life. I'm always embarrassed having too actually explain this to adults.
 
The fact that a 9 year old even had the concept of suicide in mind as a potential reality scares me. When I was 9 years old the idea of suicide was such a foreign concept that it never would have popped into my head no matter what happened. How did we get to the point where elementary school kids are committing suicides? Has this always happened, and I just didn't know about it?

The internet is quite the doorway that opens to almost limitless depravity, there is no way we should let any minors be walking through it without close supervision.

The 9 year old in question, all the "Irl" or e-bullies, and others must be watched after.

Some wag might jump in and say, "But InterneHero, how can you suggest the net is to blame?" (Statistically it is very likely, and the article eludes to it casually by my reading.)

However,

Per the article: Data from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the suicide rate of U.S. children ages 5 to 14 has nearly tripled between 2007 and 2017.

Triple the deaths, and while the 9 year old A. had the idea to cut her own wrists and B. found out how to do so. Where does such information readily circulate? If through teens now a days, still, what is the original source? I don't have to wonder.

Speaking of: Does anyone have a good guide on keeping kids away from the connected world of peer groups? Off mobile phones, laptops, and other brain cell killing devices? Please share if you have anything.
 
Never denied the bullying played a “Role”

In the same way people in the 80’s died from Pneumonia who had Aids

Yeah, dude. It's like, if a child has a learning disability and kids at school are tormenting her about it and calling her "retard" every day and spilling her lunch tray in the cafeteria and eventually she snaps and hangs herself the ultimate, root cause of her death wasn't the bullying. It was the fact that she had a learning disability.

It's that whole symptom versus disease thing. Good catch, bro.
 
So terrible that we live in a world where a 9 year old even knows about suicide, let alone how to do it efficiently...
Every day i realise how incredibly fortunate i was to grow up without internet, enjoyed a childhood spent mainly outside playing with other kids, roaming free, climbing trees, building stuff, making up games, being creative, playing sports and just having fun. Teenage years going to parties, falling in love, discovering sex and feeling like everything that happened was enormous, meaningful magical rites that had never happened to anyone before. Teasing and bullying was minimal but integral to learning about boundaries, facial expression, reading others and especially developing empathy: you could instantly see and feel if you'd gone too far, in the reactions of the group or the hurt on the other kid's face. Online bullying, with its distance and clinical execution, means never getting that feedback, kids don't see the hurt real person on the other end nor do they face the immediate emotional and social consequences of cruel or rude behaviour - it's all just words on a screen. And we may be saddled with new generations now that are virtually (no pun intended) devoid of real empathy.
It's a godawful conundrum. It's clear that the mollycoddling of the parents (and in my own country, the constant meddling from the super nanny-state) is a big part of the problem in making weak kids and future citizens handicapped by learned helplessness, but at the same time can easily understand why parents become overprotective in this day and age, with all the awful things going on, even knowing that creatives these oversensitive kids who are not equipped to deal with those awful things. What gives?

Horribly formatted wall of text aside, I agree. I'm glad I grew up still playing Tag with friends and riding my bike to the corner store (relatively safely).
 
The fact that a 9 year old even had the concept of suicide in mind as a potential reality scares me. When I was 9 years old the idea of suicide was such a foreign concept that it never would have popped into my head no matter what happened. How did we get to the point where elementary school kids are committing suicides? Has this always happened, and I just didn't know about it?

Struggles with mental health may very well be magnified by access to the internet, but they certainly aren't something that is only possible because of the internet.

I had developed depression by age 11 at the latest, perhaps as early as 9 or before.

I had a "minor" suicide attempt age 11. Whilst it may not have been as well realised, my feelings at the time were that it was time for everything to stop.

Getting the internet later, it gave me access to suicide resources, but when I made an extremely serious attempt on my life at age 15, the method chosen was actually based on the contents of an ad on TV.

TL;DR - the demons are real, so terrifyingly real. I can never properly explain the feeling because your perception of the world ends up so warped and twisted that your mind is no longer in tune with reality. I wouldn't wish it on a mortal enemy.
 
America needs to get back to this. We lost something the last 10 years or so.

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The racism from the black community toward white people is just out and in your face today. I've experienced it first hand with my son and a black woman yelling stuff at us. And the left does not want to talk about it an acknowledge how big a problem it is. Racist black kids got a 9 year old black girl to kill herself for having white friends. This story probably won't be talked about much in national news. But if everything was reversed, the media would be making it the top story for a week. Along with marches and demonstrations over this.
 
Horribly formatted wall of text aside, I agree. I'm glad I grew up still playing Tag with friends and riding my bike to the corner store (relatively safely).
Snide comment aside, you riding your bike to the corner store in relative safety pleases me greatly.
 
Snide comment aside, you riding your bike to the corner store in relative safety pleases me greatly.


Hmmmm those were the days. Used to ride through a little wooded path with my brother and the neighborhood kids to the local grocery store and/or wawa. That wooded path has since been taken over by the woods and doesn’t exist anymore (as if no one used it and the forest reclaimed it)...
 
Why are yall applying logic to Alabama?

Stop that shit before you hurt yourselves.
 
Speaking of: Does anyone have a good guide on keeping kids away from the connected world of peer groups? Off mobile phones, laptops, and other brain cell killing devices? Please share if you have anything.

My brother bought my 12 year old niece a watch that lets her make phone calls and receive text messages and has location tracking but no internet access. She doesn't have any social media accounts at home. So she's essentially cut off from that when she leaves school.

Someone I work with doesn't let his kids have a computer in their bedrooms so he can monitor the social media stuff that comes through the central computer. But for him, with sons, the issue is gamer chat rooms. The stuff that happens there ends up impacting what happens in school. So if he sees stuff then he shuts down the gaming for his kid.

I don't know that there's any one solution, especially with how fast tech changes.
 
Where the hell were the adults in all of this?

The parents, teachers, administrators etc....no one did anything?

They didn’t know that this little girl was getting incessantly harassed for a year?

Makes me sick.

Teachers and administration don't make enough money to care, unfortunately.
 
Hmmmm those were the days. Used to ride through a little wooded path with my brother and the neighborhood kids to the local grocery store and/or wawa. That wooded path has since been taken over by the woods and doesn’t exist anymore (as if no one used it and the forest reclaimed it)...
Hindsight really is 20/20, as is gratitude :)

I like your image of the forest reclaiming the path, through lack of use.

Kids who grow up now with *everything* filtered through the internet and adult lenses, really miss out on not having those organic and tangible elements in their lives: Connection to nature, connection to other people, physical movement, playfulness, creating things with your own hands etc.
And especially discovering things for yourself and making up your own mind about it, based on real experiences.
 
It certainly has its drawbacks doesn't it? I've always been interested in what actual effects our constant connection with technology is going to have on our society, and I guess we are seeing the results now. Isolation and anxiety. We are basically addicted to our phones and require a constant feed of stimulation, be it music, scrolling through social media or whatever, I can admit this myself. Are kids these days just able to sit on a couch and do nothing for even 30 minutes these days? It's like we forget what it's like to be bored.



Even scarier in some ways when it’s becoming mandatory in classrooms to use this gadgetry, so owning it and being around it as well as using it is a constant for the current generation.


But I don’t see it reversing, like the gun it can’t be un-invented, so unfortunately these stories are going to become commonplace.
 
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