William takes on web giants over ‘bile and hate ‘that drives bullied children to suicide
Prince’s passionate attack on firms that put ‘profits over values’ by allowing ‘bile and hate’ online
PRINCE WIllIAM has condemned social media giants such as Facebook for not doing enough to combat cyberbullying and demanded a fightback against cruelty and abuse online.
The future king yesterday accused technology firms of being on the back foot when it comes to fighting the ‘bile and hate’ spewed online and tackling issues such as fake news, privacy and trolling and highlighted what he called their ‘culture of defensiveness’.
The prince was speaking during a visit to the BBC in london to view the work the broadcaster is doing as a member of his Taskforce on the Prevention of Cyberbullying, including developing a new smartphone app designed to help children have ‘healthy’ relationships with their phones and social media.
In his hardest-hitting public statement to date, he said he had been moved to speak out after meeting bereaved parents of bullied children who had taken their own lives.
He said: ‘When I worked as an Air Ambulance pilot or travelled around the country campaigning on mental health, I met families who had suffered the ultimate loss. For too many, social media and messaging were supercharging the age-old problem of bullying, leaving some children to take their own lives when they felt it was inescapable.’
In a clear swipe at tech entrepreneurs such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he added: ‘The journey from inventors in the student dormitory to the leaders of some of the most valuable companies on Earth has been so fast they may struggle to understand that their incentives have changed. The noise of shareholders, bottom lines and profits is distracting them from the values that made them so successful.’
William, who was accompanied yesterday by the Duchess of Cambridge, set up his taskforce in May 2016. Studies suggest that 35 per cent of 11 to 17-year-olds have experienced cyberbullying.
But, when he attempted to raise the issue with the technology sector, William said the response was disappointing: ‘I heard doubts being cast about the scale of the problem. I was told that companies were already doing plenty.’ He said even the taskforce’s ‘modest’ early commitments, such as new guidelines for reporting bullying, had been only half-heartedly implemented.
He ended with a challenge to the big social media companies: to ‘partner with parents to make the online world a safe place of discovery, friendship and education for their children’.
He concluded: ‘Surely together, you can harness innovation to allow us to fight back against the intolerance and cruelty . . . brought to the surface by your platforms.’
LUCY ALEXANDER’S son, Felix, took his own life in April 2016, when he was 17 years old. Here, Lucy, 53, a nurse from Worcester, who is divorced from Felix’s father and has two older children, tells her story to TESSA CUNNINGHAM.
FELIX was my smiling boy. In every single family photo, it’s Felix who has the biggest grin on his face — the sort of wonderful, engaging smile that warms your heart. In my favourite photo — one of the last that was ever taken of him — he’s sporting a baseball hat and a huge smile. I look at it every night before I go to bed. I look at it and wonder how many more children like Felix are going to be bullied to death.
Felix took his own life in April 2016. He was just 17 and had been so badly damaged by years of torment, he couldn’t see a happy future.
My beautiful, smiley son had been hounded by bullies since primary school. It’s hard to know why or how it began. The only thing I can put my finger on is a silly playground squabble.
His dad and I wouldn’t let him have the 18-rated video game Call Of Duty because we thought it was too violent. Felix must have explained this to the other kids and they started teasing him over it. One called him a ‘p***y’.
But, quite honestly, it was one of many incidents too insignificant to put my finger on. It was death by 1,000 cuts.
Over the next few months, we realised he was always trying to impress. He tried being the class clown, or the whipping boy — anything to fit in. He’d say: ‘No one likes me as I am.’
We thought it would get better when he went to senior school, but it didn’t. Then, at 14, social media kicked in — particularly sites such as ask.fm — and the bullying became unstoppable.
His peers would be having vile, anonymous conversations about him. We’d remove all access to computers to prevent him seeing it, but he would get up in the night to look at his iPad. He felt he had to know everything to feel armed against it.
He was told he was ugly and worthless. There were some really hurtful comments, even from so-called ‘nice’ kids from lovely families. I’m sure they didn’t give it a moment’s thought. They just have no filter.
What they think comes out on their screen, where it doesn’t feel real because they aren’t doing it face-to-face. It was a hate fest.
If Felix tried to find friends outside school, these children would get text messages saying: ‘Do you want to be friends with the most hated boy in school?’
As the mum of this lovely, kind, gorgeous boy, it made no sense to me. But it was real. They made him feel truly hated. It was all so new and unexpected that I didn’t have a clue how to sort it out. I felt alone and helpless in this world of cyberbullying. I simply didn’t understand.
I fear that this is still the problem for many parents. We aren’t clued up enough. It’s my biggest regret. I should have taken the problem much more seriously. I was made to feel it was my problem, not society’s. I should have been more forceful in involving the school. But there was just no machinery to make it better. We were made to feel that it was something lacking in us that had made it happen.
I should have talked to his friendship groups — made them see the pain they were causing. I should have involved the police.
Off our own bats, we sent Felix to a psychotherapist. He saw her once a week and she helped teach him coping mechanisms and worked on his self-esteem.
But the damage had been done. I could count the number of parties Felix went to on one hand. That became his identity: the boy everyone hated.
Finally, we persuaded him to move to a new school for sixth form. It was a fresh start. He made new friends. Teachers found him to be bright, kind and caring. He went on a skiing trip with pals. He went out with friends. That lovely photo of him which has pride of place in my sitting room was taken on a trip to Birmingham with a friend, just six months before he died.
We thought the problem was in the past, but the truth is Felix couldn’t escape the past. He saw slights where there were none. I’ve been told that when someone is suicidal, there may be a period of relative calm before the event. And that’s what happened. Felix tidied his room, gathered his most treasured possessions in a little box — photos, a ticket to the school winter ball.
That night, we snuggled up together on the sofa and watched TV — and in the morning, we sent each other texts. ‘I love you Mum,’ he wrote.
And then, at 9am, I got a call from the school saying that Felix hadn’t appeared for class. My husband and I went looking for him. We still had no idea.
TWO hours later, the police contacted us. Felix had been struck by a train on the railway line. He was dead. After my son died, I knew I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. For his sake, and for all the other victims, I have to ensure some good comes out of it.
That’s why I am so thrilled that Prince William is working so hard to counter cyberbullying. He has given victims a voice. Thanks to his involvement, people are talking much more openly about their hurt.
It can no longer be just a dirty secret — which is how we were made to feel. But the truth, as Prince William acknowledges, is that instead of waiting for internet companies to act, we all have to play a part: parents, teachers and children.
We have a media culture that is really unkind. Just look at reality TV. On programmes such as Big Brother and Love Island, it’s the mean, nasty people who get all the airtime. The nice, kind people get pushed out.
Children model their behaviour on what they see — and, by and large, people see adults bullying each other. Bullying is increasing and becoming easier to do.
Since Felix’s death, I have been working closely with the charity Place2Be, which offers mental health counselling to young people. I’ve also been talking to schools and other interested groups about the effects of cyberbullying and how to counter it.
At the end of one talk, a girl got in touch: ‘You made me realise that I haven’t always been kind,’ she said. That really resonated.
I don’t hold any single person to blame for Felix’s death. It was a cumulative effect: the endless drip, drip that finally felt like a tidal wave of hate.
Our children need to understand that actions have consequences and that people can be wounded, sometimes fatally. It’s not up to the internet giants alone: it’s up to all of us. If we do nothing, more children will die.