In September, after a year of being bullied online, Rebecca Sedwick threw herself off a three-story cement silo, sparking an international freak-out over the responsibility social media networks like Ask.fm have in fostering this kind of harassment. But for Rebecca’s family, friends, and neighbors, the problem isn’t technology or opportunistic startups — it’s people.
Rebecca Sedwick told her mother she loved her before going to bed that Sunday night, September 8. The next morning, the Lakeland, Fla., 12-year-old was supposed to wake up her 19-year-old sister Summer to do her hair before school. She didn’t. Normally, Rebecca would put on her school uniform, grab her cell phone, and head out the door. But on this morning, Rebecca took out her phone and cleared everything on it, deleting all of the pictures, videos, and texts. She then sent two text messages to friends who lived out of state.
“I’m jumping and I can’t take it anymore,” read one, sent to a 12-year-old boy in North Carolina. The other said, “This is my goodbye for everything.” She then changed her online username from Rebecca to “That Dead Girl” and left her phone on her bed.
At that point, Rebecca would have been running late to catch the 6:45 a.m. bus to Lawton Chiles Middle Academy, where she’d recently started. Instead, she walked down her street, a swampy side road lined with sleepy mobile homes huddled under large willow trees and dangling Spanish moss, and turned right at the peeling McDonald’s billboard advertising an Egg White Delight McMuffin. (“Great taste, all yolks aside.”)
As she walked down Main Street, her aunt drove by. She braked and asked Rebecca if she wanted a ride. Rebecca told her that she was headed to the bus stop, though she had already walked past it. She also wasn’t wearing her school uniform.
Rebecca’s aunt — her stepfather’s sister — called the girl’s mother, Tricia Norman, as she drove away. She was unnerved by what she would later describe as Rebecca’s “zombie”-like behavior. Tricia, who’d already gotten to her customer service job, didn’t answer her phone and didn’t return the missed call, figuring that if it had been an emergency, there would have been a message.
Rebecca turned left at the old Lakeland fire station and walked down North Eastside Drive. She squeezed through the fence of the abandoned Lakeland Cemex plant, a bleak industrial site next to U.S. Route 92. She made her way up the winding yellow metal ladder until she reached the top of the three-story silo.
Back at Rebecca’s house, Summer was just waking up. She went into Rebecca’s room to do her sister’s hair. Rebecca wasn’t there. Confused, she sat down on her sister’s bed, accidentally landing on Rebecca’s phone. She started going through it, but all that was left was one last text: “This is my goodbye for everything.”
By 6 that night, Rebecca still hadn’t come home. Summer called her mother, and Tricia called the school. Lawton Chiles Middle Academy informed Tricia that Rebecca never arrived that day. Though the school has an automated system to alert parents of their children’s absences, it was undergoing upgrades and wasn’t in use. Frantic, Tricia issued a missing person report.
The police found Rebecca’s body around 2:30 a.m. They didn’t immediately call her death a suicide, but Tricia knew right away what had happened.
Five weeks after Rebecca’s death, Lakeland Sheriff Grady Judd arrested two girls from Crystal Lake Middle School and charged both with aggravated stalking, a felony. Although they were minors, Judd released their names: Guadalupe Shaw, a 14-year-old who went to school with Rebecca, who was the purported ringleader, and 12-year-old Katelyn Roman, her accomplice. Judd claimed they had organized a network of up to 16 other teenagers who verbally and physically threatened Rebecca in school and then bombarded her social media accounts — particularly via her Ask.fm page and an app called Kik Messenger — with cruel comments, many urging her to kill herself. And that was what elevated Rebecca’s story from a small-town tragedy to global cautionary tale for an unchecked epidemic of cyberbullying.
Both Kik and Ask.fm are especially popular with teenagers desperate for more private social networks than Facebook, which is to be expected — teens don’t want to hang out with their parents, especially on the internet. Kik Messenger is a mobile instant messaging app that gives users a discreet way to chat and share videos and pictures. According to figures from this spring, more than 200,000 people sign up for the Kik app daily, and 50 million currently use it. Kik connects users with Facebook friends and people in their phone’s address book, giving them the ability to anonymously message one another. Friends and family say Rebecca often wasn’t even sure whom she was being bullied by.
Latvian-based Ask.fm, though still relatively unheard of in the States, has been a villain in the British press for over a year now and is also centered around anonymity. Since its launch in 2010, the site has steadily gained popularity, and it currently boasts over 70 million users worldwide. In the last year, the media has linked it to the suicides of nine different teenagers, including Rebecca, earning it the nickname “the killer app.”
But when you actually look into each story, the bullying started for these kids long before an Ask.fm account entered the picture. Irish teenagers Ciara Pugsley and Erin Gallagher had been attacked for their weight and appearance by peers at school. After the two girls killed themselves last fall, the Irish Examiner presented their deaths as part of a worrisome trend of cyberbullying-related suicides, quoting hysterical parents from the community calling for Ask.fm to be banned. British teenager Daniel Perry was tricked into Skyping with someone pretending to be a girl who liked him. He was blackmailed with screenshots of the conversation before jumping from a local bridge. At the time, The Mirror directly connected his death to other Ask.fm suicides. Another British teenager, Joshua Unsworth, was bullied by classmates who made fun of his laborer father and harassed him about his dating life. Much of the abuse came in the form of Ask.fm comments. After Joshua’s death, The Daily Mail described his Ask.fm page as “a stalker’s paradise.”
One could assume that the claustrophobic mix of physical and digital bullying could bring teens more easily to the brink of suicide. The question, though, is how much more easily? Statistically speaking, teenage suicide is on the rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rates have increased from 6.3% in 2009 to 7.8% in 2011. As of 2012, 1 in 6 teenagers report contemplating suicide and 1 in 12 have attempted it. That can’t be tied to cyberbullying alone, nor does it keep pace with the increase in reports of bullying and cyberbullying on a national level.
These stories, complete with hysterical calls for social media bans and sweeping legislative reforms, don’t exactly reflect what has been happening in Lakeland. Tricia Norman began moderating two different Facebook pages to organize the community and changed Rebecca’s Kik username from “That Dead Girl” to “That Missed Girl,” which became a slogan of sorts for her friends. The same technology that alienated and isolated Rebecca, that was so quickly held to blame, is also allowing the community to come together and heal.
About a month prior to Rebecca’s suicide, worries about Ask.fm hit a fever pitch in the U.K. after Hannah Smith, a 14-year-old from Leicestershire, England, hanged herself. Once again British media, and this time even Prime Minister David Cameron, hungry for someone to blame, aggressively went after Ask.fm, repeatedly calling for “youngsters” across the nation to boycott the site. Ask.fm’s team, which typically does not cooperate with press, issued a statement:
“Ask.fm is just a tool which helps people to communicate with each other, same as any other social network, same as phone, same as piece of paper and pen,” Ask.fm founder Mark Terebin posted on his page. “Don’t blame a tool, but try to make changes. Start with yourself. Be more polite, more kind, more tolerant of others. Cultivate these values in families, in schools.”
News vans litter the front lawn of Lakeland’s Crystal Lake Middle School as students leave for the day. A cameraman hanging out of a van’s open doors sips a sweaty iced coffee and smokes a cigarette. A field reporter crouches down into the grass in his suit, scrawling notes. The neighborhood is silent aside from the hum of idling cars and the occasional ticking bug. The suburban junior high school stretches across the top of a hill, perched over the body of water after which it’s named.
Lakeland, with its population of nearly 100,000, sits between Orlando and Tampa. It’s a quiet community of suburban neighborhoods surrounding a city center dotted with Spanish-style stucco buildings. Fast-food restaurants and strip malls line the sides of the nine large interstates that race through the area, spilling out into the satellite clusters of trailer parks and industrial yards that frame the city. Its largest claim to fame, before Rebecca, is that it was used as the filming location for the mall in Edward Scissorhands.
As the Florida sun goes down, parents start sheepishly trickling into the school’s cafeteria. Sheriff Judd is supposed to arrive at 5:30 to host one his Internet Safety Parent Nights. Though it’s a class he gives regularly to help parents keep up with the best ways to make sure their children use social media and smartphones responsibly, it’s never been the focus of this much attention.
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