Bullied to death in his own bedroom
When he was alone in his room, Felix’s mum assumed he was safe. In fact, faceless online tormentors were hounding him to his grave
LIKE every mother, Lucy Alexander did everything to protect her children. That instinct is hardwired, from their first kicks in the womb, to their first day at university.
She’d zipped up coats and fastened sunhats. She’d stayed up for nights on end, swabbing sweaty brows and cuddling away night-time monsters. She’d held hands crossing roads and hung on to wobbling bicycles.
And anyone looking at this family couldn’t deny Lucy and her husband had done an exemplary job. Three beautiful children, thriving at school and successfully navigating the tricky terrain of their teens and early adulthood.
Except, there was one thing Lucy couldn’t protect her children from, something most parents are woefully ill-equipped to deal with, and it ended up claiming the life of her youngest son, Felix.
Seven months ago, this bright, handsome and sweet-natured 17-year- old took his own life, apparently driven to despair by bullying that had gone on for years — most of it online. It had sapped him of confidence and self-worth and left him — in his own words — incapable of feeling happy.
‘We just didn’t see it coming,’ says Lucy, wiping away tears. ‘We thought he’d begun to see a way out, but he was too damaged.’
This feeling of powerlessness at an evil that stalks children, even when parents believe they’re safe, prompted Lucy to write a poignant open letter, published earlier this year, which went viral.
She doesn’t chastise or blame. Instead she pleads with children ‘to be kind always, never to stand by and leave bullying unreported’. She urged young people to ‘stand up to unkindness. You will never regret being a good friend’.
She also asked teachers to be more aware of signs that pupils are struggling, and entreated parents to take more of an interest in what their children are doing online.
Lucy, 51, who works as a sexual health nurse, was overwhelmed by the number of people — most of them strangers — who contacted her since she put pen to paper.
‘I felt I needed to tell people, to warn them before it’s too late for someone else. I needed to stop another Felix,’ she says.
It’s fair to say that other Felixes must surely exist and parents, like Lucy, feel panicked and ineffectual in the face of this creeping menace. Bullying is at epidemic levels. More than 25,000 children contacted the NSPCC last year, and Childline has seen a 13 per cent rise in cases.
Between ten and 15 teenage suicides are ascribed to bullying — much of it online. The Office for National Statistics cites teenage suicides as being at a 17-year high, prompting the Crown Prosecution Service to recommend new guidelines to make prosecution of internet trolls much easier.
Yet, outwardly, it is so hard to see. The bullies of today don’t leave cuts and bruises. Indeed, look at pictures of Felix — larking around on the rugby pitch, posing in a pair of oversized sunglasses at his school prom — and what strikes you most is his smile.
‘He was known for his massive smile — with more teeth than most children should have,’ says Lucy. ‘He was bright, active and loving. He was very humorous, too.’
YET,
Lucy can see this smile was a coping mechanism, a mask. Posts on Felix’s social media pages give a belated insight into how much damage years of bullying had done. He couldn’t shake off the feeling of being ‘different’ and ‘unlikable’, she says.
‘Not photogenic, just ugly,’ he wrote on Twitter in January. ‘My social skills are nonexistent.’ In February, he said: ‘Life is severely depressing at the moment. No loyalties to anyone.’ At 12.45am on April 27, Felix posted just two words: ‘I’m sorry.’
Later that morning, he got up, got dressed for school as normal — and, having told his parents he was going to the bus stop, walked to a station near his home in Worcester, where he stepped in front of a train. He was killed instantly.
Somewhere among the howls of anguish and grief at the family’s loss came the simple, unanswerable question. Why?
What marks out a child as the one it’s OK to taunt and ostracise? What turns well-brought up children into aggressors? And, more importantly, what can parents do to stop it?
They’re questions Lucy still, after seven
months of soul-searching, cannot answer. For the first half of Felix’s tragically short life was happy and untroubled. Felix — and his elder brother and sister, whom lucy doesn’t want to name — wanted for little and all attended the independent King’s school in Worcester.
then, when he was ten, Felix stopped enjoying school as much. there was name- calling and ostracising, but lucy thought he could soldier on.
the only thing she can think of that might have marked him out as ‘different’ was an incident in 2009, when he came home from school, upset after a playground argument about the violent video game call of Duty.
‘the other children were asking him why he didn’t have it,’ she says. ‘one even called him a “p***y” because he wasn’t allowed to play it.’
like many parents, lucy wasn’t comfortable with her ten-year-old son playing age 18-rated games. But it was around this time that friendship groups started forming among his classmates — and Felix found himself on the outside.
‘In the seven years he was at school, I could count the number of parties he went to on one hand,’ says lucy. ‘that became his identity: Felix was just the boy everybody hated.
‘every day after school, we used to sit down at the kitchen table and he’d tell me what was happening.
‘He was very honest and would say if something had upset him. sometimes he would cry. We would try to find ways of dealing with it. I went into school and talked to the teaching staff, and it seemed like they were doing something about it.’
Felix moved on to senior school, still at King’s, and, when he was 14, his parents allowed him to get a mobile phone and join Facebook.
And from there, in a pattern that is becoming worryingly familiar, the bullying moved online. some of the most hurtful exchanges were conducted on the controversial website Ask.fm, where users can ask each other questions and give anonymous — and often abusive — answers.
the website, launched in latvia in 2010, has been linked with several teenage suicides in the UK and many have called for it to be shut down.
lucy describes Ask.fm as ‘poisonous’. ‘Felix was told he was ugly and worthless. eventually he logged out of the site completely because he found it too painful, but it was too late — his self-worth was at zero.’
the bullying continued on other sites: Facebook, twitter, snapchat.
‘Felix couldn’t help but fixate on it,’ says lucy. ‘there was even a bit of racist abuse [Felix’s father is of Indian origin]. People who barely knew him started joining in.
‘He spent lunch and break times on his own. He spent weekends and holidays on his own or with me. If he made a friend, somebody would message that person and say: “Why do you want to be friends with him? He’s the most hated boy in school.”’
convinced the internet was the source of her son’s problems, lucy tried cutting him off completely. ‘But he’d say I was punishing him for something other people were doing,’ she says. ‘“You’re isolating me more Mum,” he’d say.’
that same year, aged 14, Felix hit a real low. the abuse was unrelenting. Bullies shouted insults at him from the sidelines of the rugby pitch.
Once,they put his kit bag in the shower. the stress brought on a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (ocD), and he would repeatedly wash his hands, scratch his neck and obsess over specks of dirt.
‘At that age, friendships are everything,’ says lucy. ‘He said to me: “I just want one, really good friend; somebody who phones me first to tell me things.” I told him it would come. But he couldn’t see it.’
lucy and her husband decided to send Felix to a psychotherapist, whom he saw once a week for around a year. she taught him coping mechanisms, helped him work on his self-esteem — and for a few months, things started to look up.
But before long the cyberbullying became impossible to ignore again.
‘I saw some really hurtful comments,’ says lucy. ‘even by so-called “nice” kids from lovely families.’
lucy begged Felix to change schools, but he refused, fearing it would make him more of a target. to her relief, his Gcse grades weren’t good enough to get into the sixth form — his schoolwork, previously so good, had suffered — and he moved to Pershore High school, ten miles away, in september last year.
It seemed a fresh start: Felix made friends and caught up on schoolwork. A post on his social media page earlier this year shows him enjoying a ski trip to Italy with new friends. ‘Best week of my life,’ he wrote.
even the cyberbullying stopped. But for all the positive changes, Felix seemed unable to let go of the past.
‘He couldn’t manage those new friendships very well,’ says lucy. ‘He perceived slights where there weren’t any. He’d say: “It’s going to be like it was all over again.”’
In a suicide letter, found by his mother after his death, Felix summed up his despair. ‘I just couldn’t see a way to be happy,’ he said.
lucy has made it her mission to stop as many others as she can from feeling this way. she doesn’t want to point fingers, nor does she let herself feel guilty.
Instead, she says, we need to talk about cyberbullying more openly, to stop the malicious ways young people can behave online.
‘Young people are really struggling to communicate,’ she adds. ‘Felix thought all his classmates were leading this great social life without him, but many don’t know how to talk to one another outside of Facebook. We need to teach them about expressing themselves... what’s responsible to put out there and what’s not.
‘We tried to speak to people in authority, but they were at a loss as to how to deal with it.
‘teachers need education, as do parents. And this shouldn’t be a one-off conversation — it needs to be drilled into all of us, year after year, until this stops happening.’
After Felix’s death, the students in his class wrote to his parents with their favourite memories of him. there was the boy who struggled to make friends, until Felix helped him fit in. there was the girl who was sick in the first term, whose bags Felix carried along the corridors. Hundreds of letters poured in, all with one thing at their heart.
‘Kindness,’ says lucy. ‘that was Felix all over. If he is going to leave a legacy, I’d like it to be that. online or in the classroom, we need to start being kinder to one another.
‘God knows, Felix could have done with some of that.’
FELIX’S family are fundraising for Place2Be, a charity that offers mental health counselling to young people, place2be.org.uk. For confidential support, call Samaritans on 116123 or go to samaritans.org