– Swedish School Sued for not Stopping Bullying
It started off as a regular chat on MSN between a then 13 year old girl and an almost 35 year old boy. But then their conversation changed. The boy persuaded the girl to make a video showing her breasts, which she reluctantly did. After that he threatened to show the video to the girl’s friends unless she would make a video of herself masturbating. Their conversations now turned very threatening.
-I think you should do something sexy unless you want me to send our little video to everybody on my MSN buddy list, the boy wrote.
Eventually the girl agreed to masturbate in front of the camera since the boy promised that if she did this he wouldn’t show the pictures of her breasts to anyone. However, the boy didn’t keep his promise and the next time the girl came to school, about ten students there had seen the masturbation movie.
At the hearings the girl said that she was crying when she did what the boy had told her to, and that nobody in school wanted to have anything to do with her after the movie had started to circulate.
The boy claimed that is was all just for fun, but after reading the MSN conversation that the police had printed out, he admits that it sounds as if he forced the girl.
The boy was earlier this week charged with slander at the Malmö court.
The prosecutor had a word of advice to other young people out there:
“I feel that it is important that young people who spend time in the computer world become more aware of what can happen and more careful about what they say or do online.â€
The school has been sued as well in this matter, for not stopping the bullying.
The now 15 year old girl won in court, and got quite a bit of money due to her pain and suffering. The school has been forced to pay the girl 75 000 Swedish crowns.
However, the girl herself says:
-The money doesn’t matter one bit, I will never get my school years back.
On her first day in the ninth grade, she was greeted with a thrown rock hitting her in the head. In 31 days it will be the last day of school, when the ninth graders will be celebrated with singing in the church and a following party with cake at the city hotel.
The girl is not invited…
The day after her story was published in a Swedish newspaper, the school made her clean out her locker. She was forced to leave school and get her schooling elsewhere…
It was the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that published a series of articles about the girl and her situation.
Among other things, they wrote about how the girl was hit in the head with a rock the first day of school, and how her mother two days before school started found a letter in the mail saying “If you come back to school again it will be hell for you.â€
They also wrote about how things had gotten so bad that the girl wanted to take her own life…
The response from their readers was enormous! Thousands of e-mails and letters came in to the newspaper, from all over the country – but none from the little town where they lived…
The girl’s family felt as if the whole town had turned against them as well, and they are now moving to another place to get a fresh start.
