Depression Support Group
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This poor young girl was so bullied for along time that she committed suicide this week in Canada my heart goes ot to her and her family.:(
Kids can be so mean, if one doesn't look or act "normal" (whatever the fuck that means).
I too was picked on as a kid. Pretty much destroyed any semblence of a linear emotional development. But I obviously survived, and am trying to catch up on that linear emotional development.
Condolences to the girl's family.
I can't go back in time and undo the damage that led to her suicide.
I can't say or do anything that will lessen theri pain because I am not part of their lives.
A friend of mine gave me a plaque that has these words inscribed on them:
One hundred years from not,
it will not matter
What kind of car I drove,
What kind of house I livedin,
how much I had in my bank account,
nor what my clothes looked like.
But the world may be a little
better because I was important
in the life of a child.
=+=+=+=
When we take time to be somebody to a child we never really know how our interaction influences the path they walk.
Her video is on you-tube. I hope you watch it- and for those of you with children, watch it with them.
I think she aslo had troubles at home with her father.
So I've heard... Still very tragic!
Gist of the story is that when she was 12 she was fooling around online and some pervert manipulated her and got her to flash him her chest. He kept pictures of it and a year later found her on facebook and told her to give him a good webcam show or else he would send the pictures to all her friends and family. She refused and so he did it.
He did this twice more when she switched to new schools because the bullying was so bad. Her classmates called her a slut and a whore and it happened everywhere she went.
I think her parents did the best the could - but even the greatest parents in the world can't make everything all better when it's all so awful.
Last school she was in some guy convinced her to sleep with him that she honestly thought liked him and then it turned out he had a girlfriend who, shortly after, beat her up with 15 other kids watching and filming. Her Dad found her in a ditch and when she went home she tried to kill herself by drinking bleach.
Since then, every time her bullies made fun of her they'd say things like "drink more bleach next time" and awful stuff like that.
I can't imagine going through that for as long as she did - especially after switching schools so many times and nothing ever changing. How hopeless it had to have been. Poor girl....
When I was bullied as a kid, at least I could get away from it at home - I didn't have kids tagging pictures of me on facebook with horrible, nasty captions, photoshopped with bleach, like this poor girl!
The teenagers involved in attacking her and watching as it took place put me in mind of a bunch of wolves, attempting to devour and waiting to feast on the prey. Is this what our young people are becoming, slowly but surely, like animals? I hope not. When I was a child and a teenager, there were bullies; but it was not as vicious as it is today. If Amanda had been my daughter, she wouldn't have had a facebook account; neither would she have been out with her friends at age 13 unsupervised by an adult; and by no means at this boys house, alone, at age 15. Call me old fashion, but while she was under my roof and until she became 18, I would have done all I could to protect her from predators and instill in her a knowledge of self defense and awareness of evil intentions of some people in this world and build up her self esteem so that she would not have been dependent on others for her sense of self worth. I'd still be available after she turned 18, but my ability to restrict her would be limited then. These 3 means of protecting our youth, in my opinion, are way too many too many times neglected and not "drilled" into the child's psyche. Too many are among us who prey on the weak and vulnerable and those who are seeking acceptance in a world that is inundated with people that will accept only if the individual surrenders totally to the predators, i.e. goes along with the crowd. We had the same scenario when I was growing up with bullies, but I have observed it's way more vicious in today's society for the young ones. Something has gone terribly awry in my opinion. Has my generation failed our youth?