School Bullying Council

Story Published:
May 10, 2011 at 10:54 AM PDT

Story Updated:
May 10, 2011 at 5:29 PM PDT

SEATTLE — A 12-year-old girl who prosecutors say sought revenge by bullying a former friend with her own Facebook account pleaded not guilty on Monday.

The girl has been charged in juvenile court with first-degree computer trespass and cyberstalking.

The girl, along with an 11-year-old girl also charged in the case, were classmates at Issaquah Middle School with the 12-year-old victim.

The three were friends but had a falling out that prosecutors say spilled onto Facebook.

The two girls who have been charged allegedly logged into the victim’s Facebook account and edited pictures to depict a knife pointing at her head, drew devils horns and added word bubbles reading “I’m a slut.”

Using the victim’s account, the girls posted comments on other profiles saying “Have sex with me,” and soliciting men for oral sex.

“I was hurt and sad and very angry,” Leslie Cote said in an interview last month.

KOMO News normally does not identify crime victims, but Leslie and her family chose to discuss the incident that she says left her crying and unable to sleep for weeks.

“Some people looked at me differently, and then judged me differently now because of what happened,” she said.

Leslie said the former friends had access to her Facebook account because she had accidentally saved the password in the web browser on one of their computers.

When police confronted the two girls, both allegedly admitted they accessed Leslie’s Facebook account without permission because they were mad at her.

“This case reveals the dark side of social media sites used by young people,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said in a news release. “Many kids think that on a social media site that their actions will be anonymous and that they are free to use it as weapon to bully, harass, and intimidate another person.”

The 11-year-old girl who allegedly took part in the scheme has not been arraigned. A hearing has been scheduled for later this month for a judge to determine whether the girl understands that her actions were wrong.

According to the King County Prosecutor’s Office, state law presumes that children age 8 to 11 are not capable of committing crimes.

The judge also ordered the 12-year-old not to have contact with the victim, either in person or online.

If convicted as charged, the girls could serve up to 30 days in juvenile detention.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/121577664.html

CLEVELAND — About 400 Cleveland high school students argued the fictional case of a bullied student in this year’s ‘Mock Trial’ competition at the Justice Center Friday.

It’s the 15th year for the competition, and this time students from 11 high schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District were taking part.

They argued a case involving a bullied student who brought a weapon to school for self-defense. The theme was developed by Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Lauren C. Moore.

She talked to the students about one of the most important issues in their lives and at their schools.

“It is bullying. It is insensitivity. It is incivility to each other and we’ve got to stop it,” the judge said.

At the mock trial, teams from the various schools debated whether a fictional student who had been bullied should be convicted of bringing a knife to school to defend himself, should the bully attack him again.

Several Cleveland Municipal Court judges judged the competition, as did Jan Mohat, the mother of a 17-year-old Mentor High School student who took his own life in 2007 after being constantly bullied.

“He was so abused that, on the day he killed himself,” Jan Mohat told the students, ”the bully went up to him and said, ‘Eric why don’t you go home and shoot yourself, it’s not like anyone would care.’ And he did. And his sister found him.”

The students listened in silence to Mohat’s description of the abuse her son endured day after day before he ended his own life.

“People that bully, they need to look inside themselves and see what they are doing is wrong,” said John Hay High School sophomore Autumn Jefferson. ”That’s just a terrible thing to do.”

Glenville High School tenth grader Desmond Barrett agreed. He admitted to having been bullied since the fifth grade.

Barrett, who acted as an assistant prosecutor on one of the student teams at the competition, told WKYC, “I’m not going to lie to you. You try to deal with it, you try to shove it off, but you can’t. It’s a problem and you can face it sometimes, but sometimes you can’t.”

Barrett thoughtfully reflected on the story of Eric Mohat.

“That’s very sad and I don’t know how anybody could do through anything like that,” he said softly. “And I don’t think anybody should ever be bullied at any time in their life. My heart goes out to his famiy.”

The students who took part in the mock trial also signed an Anti-Bullying Pledge that encourages them, among other things, to report bullying immediately any time they see it.

Winners of the trial competition for 2011 were members of team Alpha, from the Cleveland School of the Arts.

WKYC-TV

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