A girl was bullied to death. A suicide happened and it brought to light crimes. There are more than just these two ways of looking at the death of Phoebe Prince and the events leading up to it; more interpretations, more versions of events. The circumstances under which a 15-year-old Irish girl took her own life in South Hadley, Massachusetts have now been outlined in legal terms. Nine of her peers are charged with crimes ranging from stalking to criminal harassment, statutory rape and even civil rights violations. The prosecutors are going for everything in order to get something. Inevitably, someone will pay for Phoebe Prince's death.

Bullying is horrible, but for many children and teenagers it's also a rite of passage. Some get through it safely. Unfortunately, others encounter it all the way into adulthood within their relationships and in the workplace. It's so common­place that often bullying feels like a fact of life. But that doesn't make it right.

The details of what Prince suffered will be achingly familiar to many. She was shouted at, jostled, called an "Irish slut" and an "Irish whore", followed, slagged off on Facebook and sent nasty text messages. The charges of statutory rape are more complex because just because she was legally unable to consent to sex in Massachusetts doesn't mean she didn't. (It also doesn't mean that she did.) The charges crystallise the elements of this bullying into what it was ? a campaign.

The charges are surprising because for once they're actually directly tackling the impact that bullying has. They could only be viewed as heavy-handed in a world that is extremely used to, and used to ignoring, bullying. That said, anyone who has been following the dispatches of Emily Bazelon, the American journalist and senior research fellow at Yale Law School, on the story, would have noted that the Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who is vigorously pursuing the charges, has her own history with bullying in South Hadley. As a child, she beat up a bully who was harassing her younger brother, which may colour her decision to blanket those involved in the Prince case with as many charges as is legally possible.

Their alleged crimes will not be viewed as crimes in isolation, but in the context of their consequence ? the suicide. You can't get away from that, and that's how these teenagers now stand charged. Whether that is fair or not can only be judged if it can be fundamentally proven that they had a direct hand in Prince's death, which is impossible to conclusively say.

If Prince hadn't killed herself, it's safe to say that these charges would never have been brought. The effect that not just her death, but the subsequent legal intervention will have, cannot be overstated. While teenagers will always bully and be bullied, if the warning shot of the criminal charges being brought against these teenagers is loud enough, it may make a bully think for a second before they hurl an insult at someone in class or knock their books as they walk down the hall. That is a difference worth making.

Unfortunately, usually it takes something as shocking as an individual's death to change things. That's why we say, "Does someone have to die for [insert social change here] to happen?"

Nobody should bully, and nobody deserves to be bullied under any circumstances. But the uncomfortable fact is, some people can 'take it' better than others, based on their personality, levels of self-confidence or ability to 'fight back'.

Unfortunately, those generally picked on are singled out because the likelihood of their having an emotional or physical capacity to fight back is small. And that's what makes a bully simultaneously a coward. Prince's life was also in the hands of those with a duty of responsibility: the parents of the bullies, the school, even the police. If anyone shouted stop, they most certainly didn't shout loud enough. And now she's dead.

The pain of a tragic, avoidable death such as Phoebe Prince's splits in many directions when other people are partially responsible for the end of a young life. The people who bullied Prince were partially responsible, not wholly responsible, and they should not be tried as such.

In every suicide there are a host of contributing factors, even if there seems to be one dominant catalyst. It's extremely likely that Prince would be alive today had she not been heartlessly persecuted in school. It's promising that the authorities are investigating the role of teachers and parents.

If you criminalise those kids for acting as they did, then you need also to examine those who didn't act at all.

umullally@tribune.ie