Emily Bazelon
Slate

Citation
In "What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince," Emily Bazelon of Slate shows that the journalism establishment and the legal system both erred in ascribing the suicide of a 15-year-old girl in South Hadley, Mass. to bullying by her high school classmates. The notion of a clique of students driving a classmate to her death was a compelling narrative, but it wasn't true. Bazelon's reporting makes clear that prosecuting Prince's classmates for what a troubled girl did to herself was an abuse of the law. Her meticulously reported account of Prince's final months is a model of challenging conventional wisdom and grappling with a complicated situation in a thoughtful and well-rounded way.

Excerpt
What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince?
July 20, 2010

One week last October, Bill Evans, the assistant principal of South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, chose two students to read public service announcements over the loudspeaker as part of the school's participation in National Bullying Prevention Awareness Week. In selecting kids to read the PSAs, Evans thought about who would be a spokesperson that other kids would believe was speaking sincerely. He chose Sean Mulveyhill, a senior and star of the football team. "He was a natural selection - the kind of kid who would seek out someone having difficulty just to help him," Evans says.

In his PSA, Sean laid out four steps that victims of cyberbullying can take: Don't return nasty texts or IMs. Make copies of them. Set up filters to block the bully from sending more. Talk to a caring adult. Sean's message ended: "Remember that when you are targeted by a person or group of people, whether online or face-to-face, you are not alone and you can take action to make it stop."

"Sean read it. I think he meant it," Evans says.

Six months later, Sean Mulveyhill became one of five South Hadley students facing serious criminal charges for bullying Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old ninth grader who came to the town from Ireland in September and killed herself in January. (Sean and a sixth student, Austin Renaud, were also charged with statutory rape.) The charges turned the six students into international symbols of callow teenage evil. Their names and pictures appeared on the evening news and on the national morning shows. They were kicked out of school. Sean lost a football scholarship to college. They are all facing pretrial proceedings in September, with the possibility of prison time if they're convicted.

If you've read about the death of Phoebe Prince and its aftermath in People magazine or the Boston Globe or Boston Herald or the Irish Independent, or watched TV segments about the case, the image of Sean reading an anti-bullying message might seem like further evidence that bad kids were running the show at South Hadley High. But what if that's wrong? What if Sean was in fact a strong kid who had looked out for weaker ones? What if there was no pack of untouchable mean girls ruling the halls of South Hadley High, as the Boston Globe column that kicked off national coverage of the case suggested?

I've been reporting in South Hadley since February, as part of a series on cyberbullying. There is no question that some of the teenagers facing criminal charges treated Phoebe cruelly. But not all of them did. And it's hard to see how any of the kids going to trial this fall ever could have anticipated the consequences of their actions, for Phoebe or for themselves. Should we send teenagers to prison for being nasty to one another? Is it really fair to lay the burden of Phoebe's suicide on these kids?


Biography
Emily Bazelon

Emily Bazelon, 40, is a senior editor at Slate and co-editor of DoubleX, Slate's section for women. She is also a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. Before joining Slate, Bazelon worked as an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. She is working on a book for Random House called Sticks and Stones: The New Problem of Bullying and How to Solve It. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School