Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar

he fight started at school, when some eighth-grade girls stole a pencil case filled with makeup that belonged to a new classmate, Amanda Marcuson, and she reported them.

But it did not end there. As soon as Amanda got home, the instant messages started popping up on her computer screen. She was a tattletale and a liar, they said. Shaken, she typed back, “You stole my stuff!” She was a “stuck-up bitch,” came the instant response in the box on the screen, followed by a series of increasingly ugly epithets.

That evening, Amanda’s mother tore her away from the computer to go to a basketball game with her family. But the barrage of electronic insults did not stop. Like a lot of other teenagers, Amanda has her Internet messages automatically forwarded to her cellphone, and by the end of the game she had received 50, the limit of its capacity. Read more.