<p>I love that about CC. Maybe you won’t believe me, but here (read this). Read what fifty other other smart parents say.</p>
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<p>I agree 100% with this.</p>
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<p>When I send a text or e-mail message, I expect the only person to read it is the messenger. There is no law that says you can’t joke about rape.</p>
<p>“When I send a text or e-mail message, I expect the only person to read it is the messenger”</p>
<p>You mean recipient, right? Electronic communications travel through a network of computers and get stored in one place or another. All of your “private” texts, emails, etc. can and will be pulled up from the storage media by the authorities if the need arises. I hope you understand that a text deleted from your phone does not disappear completely.</p>
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<p>Sorry, I did mean recipient. It was a given that all messages are stored in one place or another.</p>
<p>Like I said, I joke with my friends all the time about anything and everything. We know each other so well and we don’t take each other seriously when we joke. Is it the case with this girl? Who knows?</p>
<p>So insomiatic… lets say one of your friends has something seriously go wrong one day in their perfect life and you don’t know about it. you get a txt that this person is going to commit suicide, is it a joke or would you do something. Since
“Like I said, I joke with my friends all the time about anything and everything. We know each other so well and we don’t take each other seriously when we joke.”.
How would you react to that type of txt? since you joke around about anything and everything would you respond with some flippant comment about it. Then if this friend did do it your txt may be the last thing both the police and his/her family would see. You just don’t get the seriousness of this do you.</p>
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<p>Who said my friends live perfect lives?</p>
<p>Have you ever heard of an emoticon? Those are used when jokes are involved.</p>
<p>I know when my friends are joking and they know when I am joking. It’s not like we joke all the time. We talk about serious topics and have wonderful discussions.</p>
<p>I apologize for making it sound as though I thought your friends live perfect lives, I was trying to be extreme because sometimes times the ones who may reach out are the last ones you would expect it from. I do not want to derail this discussion but we had a student suicide here last year and found out that the person txt’ed all of their friends telling them but apparently (according to the press and police) not one person responded with concern. Maybe I am too old to understand today’s way of communicating but my whole point was, when is it no longer a joke. Yes I do know what emoticons are. At any rate I did not mean to jump on you or your beliefs, as I said earlier I did call the police on a similar type of situation with my D so it is close to home.</p>
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<p>It is not a joke when lol, haha, or any appropriate emoticon is not used.</p>
<p>Just curious. What did the police do in your case and what was texted?</p>
<p>As I said it was before the texting thing and it was when students were using MSN to chat. This person was sending my D chats about how this person would beat her up and destroy her pretty face. My D did not even know who was sending the chats to her because she did not know the user name, which was easy to change just opening a new MSN email address. Because it was on the computer I was able to copy and paste every message into word. The police did come and actually saw one of the messages come in to her but non leaving our computer to him. They took the information (we were able to finally ID the person) went to his house told the parents what was going on and were ready to arrest him for uttering threats but when he admitted to it they decided to go the more lenient route, and they brought it up to the school principal who then had a general assembly with the police to discuss what we now call cyber bullying ( I was at this assembly and the persons name was never used). A number of students came forward and say they were also getting these messages. He was suspended from the normal track. He did end up in jail a few years later for aggravated assault.</p>
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<p>How was he suspended for something that did not occur at school?</p>
<p>That I do not know as I was not involved at any point beyond calling the police.</p>
<p>insomniatic, if one of those messages (to multiple people) was sent from the school owned computer or even from a personal computer logged into the school network, I see why the school got involved.</p>
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<p>That’s completely true, but if it wasn’t, the issue has nothing to do with the school.</p>
<p>As I said earlier, each message can be traced to its IP of origin.</p>
<p>As one poster from NY mentioned in this thread, some school districts adopt zero tolerance policies towards cyber bullying.</p>
<p>Schools have become involved in this issue if the people involved are students at the school.While I am not sure I totally agree with it, schools more and more are involved in students lives outside the school itself, for example students texting or IM’ing inappropriate things or for example, conduct outside the school and facing consequences in school. Part of the reason I suspect is schools have been sued in cases where, for example, students on the football team had been drinking, the coach found out about it, didn’t say anything about it, something happened, and there was a lawsuit because the coach didn’t report it. In some cases, laws require that if a student is being bullied in any form by another student, even if it happens outside school hours or on texting/facebook/etc, that the school if it finds out basically has to take action,this is in response to some horrible incidents that have happened, including kids bullied to suicide.</p>
<p>As far as the statement about rape, there is no free speech protection for that, because even if the girl receiving it says it is a joke, rape is a criminal act and with minors there is little leeway given with that, it basically is assumed to be a threat, as would a message saying “I know you slept with my girlfriend, and I am going to find you and kill you”, it is a form of harassment to make threats like that, even if it is ‘a joke’. There are times when things are simply tasteless, like a bad ethnic joke, but there are things that simply have no defense; sending an image of a guy in a KKK robe to an African American kid or the death chambers at Auschwitz to a Jewish one are much like the rape one, they are way over the line where anyone could consider it a joke. </p>
<p>if this happened to a child of mine, I would talk to the parents, and if they took it as a joke I would make clear what would happen if the kid tried another ‘joke’ like that, and being suspended from school would be the least of his headaches.</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t you talk to your child first? If both parties are joking, then is there really a problem?</p>
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<p>Both parties need to understand that many other people would not find this funny and that future “jokes” of this nature could get them in serious SERIOUS trouble.</p>
<p>Statistics are frightening with respect to the number of young people who have been sexually assaulted by the time they graduate from college. Send an “I’m going to rape you” text to someone who has been traumatized in the past, and you might well find yourself in a squad car on the way to the county jail.</p>
<p>I’ll repeat: don’t confuse the way you (in your teenage wisdom) think people should react to your actions to the way they actually will react to them. What you have on this thread is a bunch of adults telling you the way many adults would react to finding a rape threat on their daughter’s cell phone even if she tells them it’s only a joke. At the very least, your parents could get a phone call about it–and if they laugh it off, the next call will be to your school or to the police. This particular threat is an immensely stupid thing to do.</p>
<p>You don’t seem to understand that the girl herself should be the judge of any future actions, not her parents. It’s her life to live, not yours.</p>