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Fanning The Blame

The case of Irish teen Phoebe Prince is being portrayed in the US media as the simple tale of a girl driven to death by bullies. But the truth is much more complex than that, reports Una Mullally

Friends of Phoebe Prince at South Hadley High School hold a candlelight vigil for the Irish teenager, who committed suicide on 14 January

Phoebe Prince

District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who said nine teens had been charged in the "unrelenting" bullying of Phoebe Prince

Sean Mulveyhill, who had a fling with the teenager before getting back with his old girlfriend Kayla Narey

Flowers are attached to a fence outside Phoebe Prince's home in South Hadley, Massachussets, where the schoolgirl had killed herself

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Phoebe Prince: the name rings a bell. Prince was the girl from Clare who moved to America and, in a plot that the media lifted from Mean Girls, was bullied to death and took her own life following a 'campaign' of bullying at her high school in South Hadley, Massachusetts. We don't hear much about it here anymore, but in the US, the story of what really happened to Prince is still a topic of almost national conversation, and last week, it reared its head again. A report by Emily Bazelon in the respected Washington Post-owned online magazine Slate teased out the complexities surrounding the lead-up to the death of Prince.

An extremely emotive column by Kevin Cullen, a journalist with the Boston Globe, titled "The Untouchable Mean Girls", a week-and-a-half after Prince hanged herself, prompted wider coverage across America. By the time television networks and supermarket magazines were getting involved, the script was set, and the narrative was so simple and agreeable that no one was going to let the truth get in the way of a good story. But of course, nothing is ever that simple.

Prince had moved to South Hadley with her mother and 12-year-old sister. Her parents were separating and her father stayed in Ireland. Prince's family's lawyer made it clear that they did not want any "non-public" information (information from police documents; interviews with staff, students and so on) to come into the public domain. Bazelon ignored this and wrote her article anyway, which painted a much more complex, but also perhaps more realistic, picture of Prince and the problems in South Hadley.

Bazelon said Prince, like many teenagers, had a record of self harming, which began in 2008. She fell out with other girls over dating older boys. She began taking Prozac in May 2009. When she moved to South Hadley, things were looking up. Her friendliness earned her popularity. She began to casually see an 18-year-old called Sean Mulveyhill who was thinking about getting back together with his ex-girlfriend Kayla Narey. In November 2009, when Mulveyhill ended his relationship with Prince, she said she swallowed a bottle of Seroquel, a drug she was prescribed by an American doctor which is used to treat bipolar depression, insomnia and anxiety. She was kept in hospital for a week. The next month, Mulveyhill got back together with Narey and Prince apologised to the latter for being involved with her on-again-off-again – but now definitely back-on-again – boyfriend. Soon after that, according to Bazelon, Prince got involved with another older American football player, 18-year-old Austin Renaud. But Renaud had a girlfriend, Flannery Mullins. In January, Mullins seemed to refer to Prince on Facebook. "We kick it with the true irish not the gross slutter poser ones," she wrote. Mullins was later heard by a teacher giving out about Prince in school, for which she received a verbal warning.

It's after that that the bullying seems to have stepped up. Sharon Chanon Velazquez, a friend of Mullins, verbally abused Prince on at least two occasions to her face, calling her a "whore". On another occasion, a teacher confronted Velazquez after seeing Prince upset and the former was suspended for two days. In mid January, a friend of Mulveyhill, Ashley Longe, referred to "Irish sluts" on Facebook. According to Bazelon, Prince saw this post when another sixth-year boy she was seeing showed it to her as she didn't have her own Facebook account. Bazelon, who interviewed this boy, said Prince also showed him cuts on her body.

On the day Prince took her own life, 14 January, she went to the school nurse with a mark on her chest that she claimed was from dropping a hot pipe on her skin when she was smoking marijuana. Both the school nurse and a social worker who was called didn't believe the story. They called her mother and Prince asked her if they could talk about it when she got home. That day, Longe shouted abuse at Prince, again calling her a "whore". There was an explicit insult written by either Longe, Mulveyhill or Narey on a "library sign-up sheet" next to Prince's name according to Bazelon. Prince met the trio again outside the school at the end of that day's classes. Again, Longe shouted "whore". When Prince was walking home from school, Longe drove by in a friend's car and threw an empty soft drink can at her, again shouting "whore". When Prince got home, she texted the boy she had been seeing, vocalising how upset she felt, and wondered what more the girls wanted from her. She then hanged herself with a scarf.

That is what happened, and these are the charges. Sean Mulveyhill is charged with statutory rape, civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury, criminal harassment and disturbing a school assembly. Austin Renaud is charged with statutory rape. Kayla Narey is charged with civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury, criminal harassment and disturbing a school assembly. Flannery Mullins is charged with civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury and stalking. Sharon Chanon Velazquez is charged with civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury and stalking. Ashley Longe is charged with civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury. It's these serious charges (the civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment) that is making some observers and reporters uncomfortable. Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate and a senior fellow at Yale law school, refused to be interviewed by the Sunday Tribune, but she spoke about her reporting in a podcast for Slate last week.

"The story of Phoebe's death is much more complicated than the media narrative that emerged and certainly than the prosecutor in this case has made any allowance for," she said. "It's still a really sad story, it's just a different sad story than we thought because Phoebe Prince before she ever got to South Hadley had mental health troubles of her own. She was cutting herself and went on anti-depressants in Ireland in 2008 and 2009 and then she came to South Hadley and got involved with two boys who had girlfriends, which upset the girls, and then one of the boys had trouble figuring out, I think, how to get away from her and that caused a lot of trouble for her in these peer conflicts she was having.

"Now, I'm getting... kind of vilified for blaming the victim, and that's not at all what I am intending to be doing. I just want to point out that she was a complicated kid and people who commit suicide usually have these underlying troubles."

Bazelon is not alone in reporting on this case. People magazine, which has a circulation of over three million, dedicated its 26 April front cover to the story. The case also continues to be reported in the largely pro-Irish Boston press. The story has captured the imagination of the American media for several reasons. The setting is one that is white and comfortably middle class. The US media is obsessed with high-school politics. Prince was pretty, another selling point for coverage, and she was a recent immigrant, a situation intrinsic to American life.

Prince's suicide was used as a touchstone for countless articles about cyber bullying in the American media. Cyber bullying was certainly a factor in the case. Facebook and Twitter acted as a forum for slandering Prince, and the DA used this to illustrate the relentless nature of the bullying, which is really a symptom of the modern socialising of teenagers. Chatter doesn't stay in the school yard – it migrates online and into text messages long after the school bell rings out. "It makes the bullying incessant for those being targeted," Bazelon said in the Slate podcast. "It plays into teenagers' developmental weak spots because it's about this impulsive behaviour."

To properly understand the charges these teenagers are facing, we spoke to Rosemary Curran Scapicchio, a respected criminal defence attorney based in Boston. Regarding the civil rights violations resulting in bodily injury charge, Scapicchio says that means "not only was Phoebe injured, but they violated her rights by using a sexually derogatory name, or a name derogatory to her gender or race, that would be the basis for those charges... With civil rights violations typically there is assaultive behaviour." The stalking charge relates to online behaviour. "There was activity on Facebook pages and messages and text messages that went back and forth that were pretty threatening, and she couldn't get away from it. Not only was she bullied in the school building itself, the online activity and text messages meant that they never let her get away from the bullying," says Scapicchio. "Criminal harassment is when you've been told by the alleged victim to stop what you're doing and you continue that behaviour when you've already been notified it's unacceptable," says Scapicchio.

Like many lawyers in Massachusetts, Scapicchio has an opinion on the charges that have been brought. "The reason they came down so hard in Phoebe Prince's case is because they want to say someone needs to do something, the law needs to change. Whether these particular defendants should get criminal records because of that, that's a different question, but definitely they are using this case as a catalyst for change in Massachusetts." And then there's the elephant in the room: what blame the school itself, for facilitating this bullying, is actually taking. "She [Prince] had complained to school officials," Scapicchio says. "There wasn't a thorough investigation, they dropped the ball. It's kind of ironic you take a bunch of 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kids and hold them as responsible parties, yet other people working in the school didn't get so much as a suspension. I think it's wrong."

The teenagers charged are expected to begin the pre-trial process next month. Whether the complex charges will hold up in court remains to be seen. Certainly, the DA appears determined to follow this case through to a conclusion involving punishment, but there is a danger in the selective ascribing of blame. According to the police reports and interviews with students, Prince was not tortured day in day out, or part of a relentless orchestrated campaign of bullying. What some of her bullies did was horrible and deserves punishment at some level, but their actions are now being viewed in the context of a suicide. If Prince hadn't died, these charges would never have been brought. From Bazelon's reporting, it looks as though the bullying of Prince was a contributory factor to her death, but it was not the only reason. Prince had underlying problems which preceded the behaviour of others around her in South Hadley. Yet at the same time she most likely would never have been pushed to suicide had the bullying not occurred. It's complicated.

A teenage girl is still dead, a community is still reeling, a family is still distraught and, now, six young lives may be ruined. Some of that is still preventable.