Bullying heartbreak My child had nowhere to hide
As yet another youngster takes his life, Margarette Driscoll looks at what online sites and parents can do to halt this tragic scourge
Just over a fortnight ago, on one of those surprisingly warm, late September days, it was Natasha MacBryde’s 21st birthday. Her mother Jane should have been filling the family home in Worcester with presents and popping open the champagne. Instead, she went to work. “I kept my head down,” she says. “It was just a question of trying to get through the day.”
Tasha (as the family called her) was a beautiful, clever girl hoping to be a vet or paediatrician, who seemed perfectly happy at school – the feepaying Worcester Royal Grammar – until a few months after she turned 15, when she suddenly wanted to dye her hair brown. “I said: ‘What for? You’ve got lovely hair.’ Now I think she was looking for ways not to be noticed,” says Jane. “I think some of the other girls were jealous.”
Jane discovered, over the next few weeks, that Tasha had become the target of nasty messages from fellow pupils on Formspring, a website (which has since closed) where the senders could remain anonymous. She was further upset at being rejected by a boy she liked. On the evening before Valentine’s Day, she looked at Formspring one last time – with its latest, poisonous message calling her a “f------ slut, hiding under all your make-up” – then slipped out of the house and walked to a nearby railway track. She was hit by a train.
There were troubling echoes of her story last week, when Lucy Alexander – also from Worcester – wrote an open letter about the torment suffered by her 17-year-old son, Felix, who was bullied online and, like Tasha, ended his life in front of a train. Felix, who shines out from family pictures with his open smile and tousled hair, was targeted for seven years and “so badly damaged by the abuse, unkindness and isolation he experienced that he was unable to see how many people truly cared for him”, wrote his mother..
New figures from the Office for National Statistics show teenage suicides are at a 17-year high: 186 took their own lives in 2015, an increase of 48 per cent in the past three years. Last Monday saw the funeral of Asad Khan, an 11-year-old boy found hanged in his bedroom in Bradford after allegedly being bullied. Experts say that during periods of transition – such as changing schools – children become particularly vulnerable. Asad had recently started at secondary school.
Between 10 and 15 teenage suicides every year are directly ascribed to bullying (though coroners tend to be reluctant to name it as a cause of death, as there are usually other factors involved).
The latest deaths come in the wake of a Children’s Society report that British youngsters are among the unhappiest in the world. Girls aged 10 to 15 often reported feeling “ugly” or “worthless”: over the past few years, on average, some 11 per cent of both boys and girls in the study have described themselves as “unhappy”. Research by the Department of Education shows girls’ mental health has worsened, compared with their counterparts in 2005.
Meanwhile, bullying – particularly cyberbullying – has surged.
“One girl’s classmates took against her and set their phones to send her texts every few seconds just before class started, saying: ‘You’re ugly, kill yourself, we hate you.’ Imagine her utter distress,” says Claude Knights, chief executive of Kidscape, the antibullying charity. “You could not do that without technology; that intensity and the paranoia it leads to.”
Schools are obliged to have an antibullying policy, but, says Kidscape, around one in four schoolchildren will be vulnerable to ill-treatment. The NSPCC says more than 25,000 of its Childline counselling sessions last year concerned bullying (11,000 of those about online bullying).
Finding a solution to this problem has become the holy grail for psychologists working with teenagers, but at least some of the answers are out there, says Professor Helen Cowie, an authority on bullying in schools. “It’s so sad to hear about another poor mother who has lost a child, but my message to others would be: don’t despair, don’t give in. There are things that can help.”
Felix’s problems began when he was just 10 and a pupil at the independent King’s School. Boys began teasing him because his mother would not allow him to play
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, an 18-rated video game. “It escalated into people who barely knew him joining in,” wrote Lucy, “and then he became ‘Felix who everyone hated’.”
By the time he was 14, Felix was also being abused online, initially through Ask.fm (another site where users can leave anonymous, abusive messages, and which was linked to the suicide of 14-year-old Hannah Smith, from Leicestershire, in 2013). It then spread to “every social media platform you could imagine”.
Five years after Tasha died, how could such a similar tragedy happen again? Both sets of parents seem to have been helpless in the face of the onslaught. Jane told Tasha Formspring was a “ridiculous” website and not to look at it. “I wish I’d never
let her have a laptop,” she says now, “but if all their friends have one and they don’t, they’re picked on for that reason, aren’t they? You can’t win.”
Felix moved to a state secondary for sixth form but the bullying followed. Lucy was shocked that it was often “nice” children who were the cause of her son’s anguish, but neither bully nor bullied are always predictable, says Prof Cowie, co-author of New Perspectives on Bullying.
“Bullies are often quite popular,” she says. “They’re controversial but cool people to be with – and quite frightening, so if you want to stay safe, you go along with them. Sometimes they are being bullied themselves and take it out on others, but often they don’t even realise the damage they’re doing.
“The victims tend to be different in some way. It might be to do with sexual orientation or they might be clever or very talented at sport, or ballet. For some reason, the peer group decides this person does not conform, and smells blood. Now, with access to the internet and mobile phones, the victim can be attacked any time of the day or night. There’s no safe place.”
Prof Cowie believes chains of teenage “defenders” supervised by teachers could act as an altruistic support system, putting on lunchtime activities, say, and inviting along kids who routinely sit alone. Knights says teaching “life skills” to teenagers may be the answer.
Coming off social media is a nonstarter: “I talk to young people who have been brutalised – that’s the only word for it – through their phone, and if you suggest they switch it off, or close their Facebook, they gasp with horror,” she says.
“While it’s an instrument of torture, it’s also a way of being in touch. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle, so you have to equip young people to cope. You would be amazed at how many don’t activate their privacy settings – basic stuff. Or they put up inappropriate photos in poses that lead people to make fun of them, which then causes distress.”
The Government has just announced the trial of a new app, Tootoot, which will provide 24-hour support for young people who are victims of online abuse, one of nine initiatives, costing £4.4 million, aimed at counteracting cyberbullying. The app will allow victims to submit screenshots of abuse or photographs of bullies in action and – crucially – do it anonymously. No one but teachers at their school will read the reports.
A complementary scheme will train 4,500 teachers and 60,000 parents about how to protect children from cyberbullying.
Jonathan Brown, from Place2Be, the children’s mental health charity, says parents can play a crucial role in protecting their family by discussing bullying when they are young.
“If you can talk about how and why people sometimes hurt each other and make children feel it’s OK to express their feelings, they’re more likely to be open later on,” he says. “Bullying can be a very shaming experience, so if you don’t have that grounding in being able to talk, those feeling of humiliation can multiply.”
Parents should also be their children’s online friends, says Knights. “Don’t do it at 14 when they want their privacy. Be involved in their online life from the start, so they’re used to you sharing it.” In her letter, Felix’s mother said nastiness was too often dismissed as “banter”, and appealed to teenagers to be kinder to one another online: “Be that person prepared to stand up… you will never regret being a good friend.”
Tasha’s mother says children should be taught never to put anything in a text that they would not say to someone’s face. She believes the girls who sent nasty comments to her daughter didn’t really mean to hurt her badly.
So the challenge is to make teenagers understand that cyberspace is real, not virtual. When they hurl insults, they hit real people with real feelings, sometimes with tragic results.
‘Children should be taught never to send a text that they would not say face-to-face’