Someone who continues to bully someone who is already dead and in a casket at their funeral isn't a "mean girl"--that's a sociopath. We're talking about behavior that someone who doesn't need years of therapy would never engage in, or someone who has been socialized by a family that understands common courtesy and how people are expected to behave in public. A person who does that may have seen something similar in a work of fiction--perhaps a soap opera, either daytime or (more likely now) nighttime--but if they duplicate that behavior in real life, they clearly lack an understanding of the difference between fiction and the real world. And if a family defends this kind of bizarre behavior or any other bullying behavior--bear in mind that the child is a product of that family, so it really shouldn't shock.
Spreading lies about a person is one of the most insidious types of bullying, and seems to be the kind of cyberbullying that's most common, but it took place back when I was in high school using landline phones, notes in lockers and other primitive methods. Never underestimate the power of a nasty rumor to make a kid feel like she wants to crawl under a rock--or kill herself. While most people will claim that they believe lying is a terrible thing to do and insist that they always tell the truth, in reality they will usually lie to make themselves look good (or not look bad). That's fairly typical human behavior. A bully, however, will spread malicious lies to make someone else look bad, which I don't believe is typical for most people. You have to have a particularly nasty mind-set to not care about hurting someone else in that way, and even nastier and scarier if you're still attacking that person after you've driven them to kill themselves.
In my experience, authorities think that the best approach is to separate the bully and the bullied, but all that does is to teach the bullies how to get rid of people they don't like. They've achieved their goal when that happens, which is a rotten message to send them, because they WILL do it again the next time they want to banish someone else. No one ever seems to see this behavior as a red flag concerning the bully, or consider how to help the bully to turn over a new leaf, let alone punishing them. I have never, ever experienced seeing or hearing about a bully being punished or reformed. No one even tries, and that's why it continues. There are no negative consequences for anyone but the bullied.
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Spreading lies about a person is one of the most insidious types of bullying, and seems to be the kind of cyberbullying that's most common, but it took place back when I was in high school using landline phones, notes in lockers and other primitive methods. Never underestimate the power of a nasty rumor to make a kid feel like she wants to crawl under a rock--or kill herself. While most people will claim that they believe lying is a terrible thing to do and insist that they always tell the truth, in reality they will usually lie to make themselves look good (or not look bad). That's fairly typical human behavior. A bully, however, will spread malicious lies to make someone else look bad, which I don't believe is typical for most people. You have to have a particularly nasty mind-set to not care about hurting someone else in that way, and even nastier and scarier if you're still attacking that person after you've driven them to kill themselves.
In my experience, authorities think that the best approach is to separate the bully and the bullied, but all that does is to teach the bullies how to get rid of people they don't like. They've achieved their goal when that happens, which is a rotten message to send them, because they WILL do it again the next time they want to banish someone else. No one ever seems to see this behavior as a red flag concerning the bully, or consider how to help the bully to turn over a new leaf, let alone punishing them. I have never, ever experienced seeing or hearing about a bully being punished or reformed. No one even tries, and that's why it continues. There are no negative consequences for anyone but the bullied.