[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/05/26/piper.youtube2.art.jpg caption="An eleven-year-old girl is the victim of extreme cyber bullying in a video posted on YouTube.com."]
From CNN’s Bob Ruff
Who on earth would post a video on YouTube on how to kill a 6th grade girl?
Turns out… it would be her classmates.
The 11 and 12-year-old girls are students at the Elk Plain School of Choice in Spanaway, Washington. The video, which the girls made away from school, details the “Top Six Ways to Kill Piper.” (YouTube has since removed the video.)
Their suggested methods? Everything from using a gun on Piper, to pushing her off a cliff, to forcing her to commit suicide by hanging from a tree.
The girl, Piper Smith, and her mother are angry and going public. Watch "American Morning" Wednesday for an interview with Piper and her mom.
Earlier Piper told CNN affiliate KING5-TV that “It really, really hurts my feelings. I mean, if somebody hated me that much just to make a video about me like that, it would make me feel really bad.” Her mother, Beth Smith, was “horrified. I would hope to find kids making jokes, and it wasn’t. It was death.”
So far the local Piece County, Washington Sheriff’s Department has not pressed charges against the girls.
The school district issued a statement, which says that the offending girls have been disciplined and that they have “expressed their remorse.” The school cited privacy reasons for neither releasing the names of the students nor the specifying the type of punishment
The case reminds New York psychotherapist Karol Ward of the movie “Mean Girls”, in which the cliquish “Queen Bee” girls terrorize less popular students. “Adolescent girls,” she says, “often get into a pack mentality... it’s got a deep psychological root to it, but it also just has the general view of, well, that person is different from me so I’m going to reject them.”
While the Spanaway, Washington case is unusual, cyber bullying and other forms of bullying are not. The National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) released a survey in 2007 stating that more than four in 10 teens experienced some form of cyber-bullying in the previous year, and that it’s more prevalent among teen girls.
To attack the problem, the NCPC has set up a contest for PSA’s that urge teens not to cyber bully other students.