Words That Wound.

ROLCAM · Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 11:59 am Post subject: Words That Wound.

Words That Wound.

Once upon a time there was a little girl. She was a bit of a loner; one of those geeky, nerdy kids who read encyclopaedias as a hobby, and haunted parish bazaars in order to augment her collection of…. old mathematics text books.

She could not be bothered with fashionable clothes; argyle knee socks, gyms shoes, sweatshirts and jeans were her out-of-school uniform.

Her parents despaired. They thought she was deliberately trying to make herself the target of bullying in order to deflect some of the attention from her beautiful, though less intelligent by far, younger sister.

Yet, incongruously, she was never bullied throughout primary or secondary school….The children in her class left her to her own devices – and she didn’t even notice this, because she was usually nose-deep in a book. She was the only one in her peer group to obtain ten straight “A”s in her ‘O’ Levels.

The trouble happened later, when she began tertiary education.

For her lucky sixteenth birthday, she was given a laptop; and her sister somehow persuaded her to become one of the zillions of people with their personal details broadcast all over the ether in communities such as Facebook and the like.

Imagine her surprise when up popped a mail from someone – a boy – who said he knew her, and that had known her since she was a kid… giving her enough details to prove that this was so. This boy went on to say that he was wary of approaching her personally, because she seemed so remote, and so serious, that he was “a bit scared” of her.

This girl – let’s call; her Alice – decided that there was more to life than books and knowledge for its own sake. She shared this information with her younger sister, but begged her not to tell her parents about this boy – whom we’ll call Anthony.

This weird love affair continued. Anthony said he would not divulge his identity just yet” because he was not sure that she would like him after all. And Alice, who had never even felt the need to have a boyfriend, used to look around her surreptitiously, out in the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone who might be him.

Then came the bombshell. Antony told Alice that he "did not love her any more" because he had been told she could be very cruel to her friends”. Alice was devastated. She would never harm a fly, let alone another human being.

And when her mother went to the orthodontist with her younger sister… Alice hanged herself. And the upshot is that it was all a cruel hoax by a neighbour whose daughter, despite studying hard, never achieved the same results as Alice.

This is not fiction. It is a composite storey of news items that have appeared over the last few months, in the local and foreign press, and also includes facts that have been told during school talks and in private conversations where cyber-bullying is happening in [local] schools.

How diligent are we being about this? The answer is simple: not half enough!
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Roland Camilleri

Moderator

Sydney , Australia.

zhang369 · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 1:45 pm Post subject:

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