BALTIMORE, MD – School officials in a greater Baltimore-area suburb are scrambling to redress a widespread cyber-bullying epidemic following a student’s threat to commit suicide that was posted on Reddit.
Arundel High School administrators are responding to a post last Wednesday, March 14 on the Web site Reddit from a student who called herself “Sarah.” The post–under the heading “The cyber bullying has gotten to the point where the school will not take any action unless I kill myself. Reddit- how do I get my story out and make this stop?” [italics added]— accuses school administrators of failing to address repeated student complaints about ongoing cyber-bullying.
In particular, the note on Reddit cites a male student with a history of verbally bullying other students both in person and on Twitter, with special targeting of students involved in the school’s Gay Straight Alliance.
Reddit is a social news website where registered users submit content, and other users vote the submission “up” or “down” in order to rank and determine its position on the site’s front page and subsequent pages. Less than 12 hours after posting the note, “Sarah” had already received over 4,000 comments.
School officials also began to receive a barrage of letters and emails from people across the country to expressing concern for “Sarah” and the school’s other bullied students.
In the post, “Sarah” wrote “I am not asking for therapy, but help in gaining momentum,” before reporting the details of the ongoing psychological torture experienced by her and other students.
“Since the beginning of the school year, I have been harassed both in person and online by the school’s ‘bully.’
It is hard to use the word because almost everyone knows and loves him.” Echoing the last part of that statement, she later wrote: “The bullying isn’t worthy of school attention unless I die.”
Among excerpts posted from the alleged bully’s screenshot-captured tweets were “’Life has its ups, and you have the Downs. Please do us a favor, and fucking drown’ — A poem dedicated to Sarah” and “Sarah for biggest slut. Go die.”