Let’s take a moment to realize that 95% of you hadn’t heard of cafe mom as an outlet until just now. And that the article’s headline is misleading/tabloidy at best. And while the rest seems well researched, it’s clearly misleading a bit. If you start beating a kid on the bus and ask others to join in, it’s not a surprise that you get suspended. Yes, she’s also the victim of terrible bullying and felt let down by the faculty (who - understandably - may need more than hearsay before they start taking action). You can still not beat people up. Nobody doesn’t understand that she did it. And indeed even the police looks at all of this as mitigating circumstances. And she’s back in school and on probation and that’s hopefully what they do with all kids who start fistfights. The buried headline is that the other kid is under police investigation, which has the potential not only to get him suspended after all but will have even more serious consequences. From what I read here, the system works as well as it can but the story is written to cause outrage.

I understand that victims of bullying like this or sexual assault in general face an uphill battle they never wanted to fight. And with the details in this story I can totally understand why the girl snapped. And I wish her nothing but the best and appropriate punishment for the kids who circulated the images. And still, you can’t resort to violence and expect not to be punished for it. We are not talking about self defense here.

you can’t resort to violence and expect not to be punished for it.

No one is saying that. Cafemom linked to the AP article they shortened.

The actual issue is she already gone to school administrators and wasn’t believed so nothing happened. Even at her young age, she is learning that women are not believed while being sexually harassed. She already attempted to deal with the problem “the right way” but the system failed her.

The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.

With the mocking unrelenting, the girl texted her sister, “It’s not getting handled.” As the school day wound down, the principal was skeptical. At the disciplinary hearing, the girl’s attorney asked why the sheriff’s deputy didn’t check the phone of the boy the girls were accusing and why he was allowed on the same bus as the girl. “Kids lie a lot,” responded Coriell, the principal. “They lie about all kinds of things. They blow lots of things out of proportion on a daily basis. In 17 years, they do it all the time. So to my knowledge, at 2 o’clock when I checked again, there were no pictures.”

It’s easy to armchair moralize that this teenager acted inappropriately. But the very day she attacked the kid she was pleading for help at the school office for the systemic problem.

“When we ignore the digital harm, the only moment that becomes visible is when the victim finally breaks,”

You’re looking for a victim who only ever acted perfectly, instead of looking at the broken system that could’ve prevented this situation by guidance councilors, sheriffs and principals actually believing her one of the multiple times she sought help.

I mentioned that I do understand why she did what she did. You add more information to this story that only increase understanding as far as I’m concerned.

Let me turn this into an extreme example for comparison’s sake. If a parent shot their child’s rapist and murderer, we all get it. Nobody will say “I have no idea why they would do such a thing.” A lot of us outsiders would look at that case and even be glad about this outcome. And at the same time, the mother or father would end up in prison. Because you cannot take the law in your own hands and expect not to be punished for that. There will be mitigating circumstances, they won’t go in for life. The punishment might just be exactly the time they spent in custody before their trial. But there will be punishment because we have rules about that. (Obviously, this example is not the same as this case of bullying. I’m only using it to compare consequences.)

Was this self defense? She was just defending her digital privacy? I’m not a lawyer. As a layman, I’m going to say this does not meet the legal criteria. Morally? Absolutely.

We can meter out appropriate punishment to everybody else here: the school that maybe responded badly. The parents of the dipshits who got their hands on an undress app. The fact that there are undress apps available to middle schoolers or anybody really. Etc. But we also have the benefit of hindsight.

You and I get why she threw punches. We might even go as far as cheering her on, in our heads, had we somehow been there. Go get those bastards, black eyes for all of them. My point was merely that if you resorted to violence like that you cannot expect not to be punished for it. Like in my extreme example, there are mitigating circumstances. Plenty of them. All should be considered. But there will be something on the record. In this case the suspension/probation, which I hoped is the punishment for every fight.

She got suspended and he didn’t (yet, as we find out halfway through). The headline of the linked article in the post implied that this was the outrageous part. My criticism was aimed first and foremost at the writer/editor of that article.

Was this self defense? She was just defending her digital privacy? I’m not a lawyer. As a layman, I’m going to say this does not meet the legal criteria. Morally? Absolutely.

Why do you say that?

She was being harmed and so she defended herself, and the harm stopped. Looks like self-defense to me.

In my view, self defense is a legal defense when somebody used violence to defend themselves against an immediate threat of physical harm. I don’t see how, legally, you could expand the parameters to fit this case. But I’m also not a lawyer.

The argument it seems to me you could be building here is that the victim of despicable bullying, ignored and misunderstood by all the authorities, lashed out out of desperation. And that in itself is an act of self defense. I think that’s a moral way to look at it, but not a legal one. The latter will look at this exactly as mitigating circumstances.

What is required is that there is a reasonable belief that they are in imminent physical danger. There are other factors, like attempting to deescalate and such, but she actually did that when she begged her school for help.

And being sexually harassed is reasonable reason to believe that they are in danger of sexual assault, or worse.

That’s why, when the police got involved, the boy was arrested and now faces 10 charges. She has not been arrested and is not facing charges. Legally, she seems to be in the clear.

You clearly have a different take on the situation. A bunch of dipshits showing deepfakes around on a bus, ostensibly with other people around who are not party to this dispute and a grownup in the driver’s seat, does not convince me that even your interpretation applies here. But neither one of us was present, we are both arm chairing this, we are just sitting in different arm chairs. Let’s leave it at that.