It started a couple of weeks ago with an innocent friend request on Instagram — a popular social media site for sharing photos — when a user under the name of “Sobrato Bops” sent an electronic invitation to Kim Valles, a junior at Ann Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill.
The 16-year-old and avid Instagram user has received countless friend requests, none of which she considered shady or creepy, but this time Valles had her reservations and decided to deny the request.
“I actually didn’t approve it,” said Valles. “I didn’t care to see it, so I just denied it.”
However, some of Valles’ friends and classmates accepted the same invitation out of sheer curiosity. That’s how Valles, glancing at her friend’s cell phone, learned the “Sobrato Bops” sender was posting photos on Instagram of female classmates detailing in vulgar terms what the teen girls had “done with boys.”
The colloquialism “bops,” Valles explained, is unflattering slang denoting a promiscuous girl.
“Your personal life gets put out there and people start talking,” said Valles, who said she didn’t care if the statements were true or not, but pointed out that it was the talk of campus for the next two days.
“Everybody was talking about it,” she added. “You could tell by their faces (at school) that they knew what people were saying. They looked embarrassed.”
Valles said the user account disappeared from the site within a couple of days, shortly after the shocking story of a 15-year-old Saratoga girl who committed suicide due to alleged sexual assault and cyberbullying had gone national.
By then, the damage was already done.
“It gets old, but those girls still have reputations from that,” Valles pointed out.
It’s still unclear as to the identity behind the scandalous Instagram handle that sexually objectified at least a half dozen Sobrato teen girls. Administrators were alerted to the feed but had no way of tracing the user once the account was deleted.
The incident correlates to a dangerous cyberbullying epidemic that was catapulted to headlines recently since the death of Audrie Pott. The teenage girl hung herself Sept. 10 after posting on her Facebook page that her reputation was forever ruined and she could not take the text messaging and social media harassment anymore from her alleged attackers.
The three accused 16-year-old boys — including one who transferred to Christopher High School in Gilroy and was arrested on campus April 11— face felony charges in criminal court and their parents are part of a wrongful death claim in civil court.
The CHS student, along with his two former classmates at Saratoga High School, may go from juvenile proceedings to adult court if the DA’s office follows the demands of the Pott family and requests a fitness evaluation of the teens to determine if they will be charged as adults.
The juvenile court judge overseeing the criminal case recently released the three boys to the custody of their parents and placed them under house arrest, according to an NBC news report. The boys are allowed to attend high school, as a CHS coach confirmed seeing one of the accused walking the CHS campus with a court-ordered ankle bracelet.
On the same campus Thursday, junior Jacob Garcia — motivated by the horrific details surrounding Audrie’s death — held a special anti-bullying rally, called “Heart to Heart” to “bring awareness to students, staff and the community as a whole.”
“Bullying is real, it is alive and it is taking the life of our children, our friends and our future,” said Garcia, who is part of the student-led Link Crew, a club of juniors and seniors who are active on campus in helping freshmen with high school life and promoting positive behavior among classmates.
Garcia described cyberbullying as “the most devastating type of bullying” because “with one click of a button,” word spreads to classmates, friends and peers across the country through cyberspace.
One of Garcia’s friends, whom Garcia calls “an idol for gays, lesbians and transgenders” spoke openly about his struggles during Thursday’s gathering. CHS’s anti-bullying and suicide club also shared their message, while Garcia and the Link Crew asked classmates and staff to paint their hands and leave a hand print on a large canvas to show their solidarity in helping to stop bullying and its negative effects on students.
Even Austin Corini, a 16-year-old junior at CHS known for performing on the FOX TV show, “X-Factor,” is all too familiar with the harsh reality of cyberbullying amongst teenagers.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of bullying,” said Corini. “Kids can be pretty brutal.”
Executive Director Larry McElvain of Discovery Counseling Center in Morgan Hill said it is important for children to have an adult role model to confide in and talk about their troubles so they don’t keep everything bottled up inside.
“Internally, you build these things up unless you have someone to talk to,” he said.
Students subjected to bullying, he added, typically become aggressive and lash out, or have a tendency to isolate themselves.
McElvain is hoping to start “having a more collaborative relationship with schools” so he can have his counselors on campus to identify the tell-tale signs of bullying.
The cyberbullying incident of “Sobrato Bops” isn’t an isolated one either, as President Michael Altamirano of Sobrato’s Associated Student Body will attest. He shared another recent, similar case on Instagram that showed pictures of male classmates who were targeted for potentially being gay.
The problem isn’t limited to high school, as demonstrated earlier this year at Britton Middle School in Morgan Hill when police arrested a 14-year-old student on suspicion of bullying. The male student allegedly used text messages and social media postings to continually harass two 13-year-old classmates.
“Students need to know that words hurt,” Altamirano said. “I urge all students who are victims of cyberbullying to come forth and report the abuse to an adult because this situation will only get worse.”
The issue is an ongoing battle in Gilroy, where the problem was discussed in-depth almost exactly a year ago during an April 2012 Board of Education meeting.
“When we were kids you would do this after school,” mused GUSD Superintendent Debbie Flores at the time. “But this generation of students, they do everything electronically, through Facebook, MySpace, texting…we get copies of their texts when we’re disciplining them, and it’s pretty amazing the kind of language they use with each other. So we’re in a whole new era with discipline.”
CHS Principal John Perales noted that “cyber harassment is a huge issue for us that spills onto our campus almost daily. It’s rare that a week goes by that we don’t see a harassment issue.”
CHS continues to combat that issue. Perales advises parents to periodically check their child’s Facebook page, text messaging and know their passwords – all practices he uses with his own teenage son.
“I tell them, ‘you’re the parent. You have to be proactive. You have to check,’” explained Perales, of the advice he gives to parents.
He also tells his students, “if you don’t want your mom to read it, then don’t post it.”
—Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people, resulting in about 4,400 deaths per year. For every suicide, there are at least 100 suicide attempts.
—Over 14 percent of high school students have considered suicide, and almost 7 percent have attempted it.
—Bully victims are between two and nine times more likely to consider suicide than non-victims.
—At least half of suicides among young people are related to bullying: 10- to 14-year-old girls may be at even higher risk for suicide.
—Nearly 30 percent of students are either bullies or victims of bullying, and 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because of fear of bullying
Source: www.bullyingstatistics.org
