Whats disturbing, is that the adults did nothing to protect this poor girl when it should have been immediately obvious she was being victimized. Sometimes when your being bullied, simply having an older kid or adult take your side can be immensely comforting.
The solution here is parenting. And while I find the lack of action by school officials disturbing, I wonder if they would have made things worse by getting involved. In reality they probably should have gotten in touch with the girl's parents proactively and discussed the situation.
As the parent of a child who was bullied, I can say that addressing it myself was the only option I could see. I found out the names of the kids who were doing it, looked them up in the School Directory (which probably no longer exists due to privacy issues), and visited the homes of the kids involved - unannounced. I took my son with me and simply said I was there to speak to the bully's parent or guardian. I wasn't angry in my approach. I was quite matter of fact, presenting a problem and asking for help with the solution. A few of the kids were kept at the door by the parent and none of them disagreed with what was stated.
It was important enough to my son and he trusted me enough that this succeeded. His willingness to go with me convinced me he was being honest and made it very easy to convey to him that he had my total support. I think shock value - because so few parents did this kind of thing back then - was hugely helpful. Even the parents who may have been belligerent had I called and made an appointment weren't able to muster much bluster, especially if their son was there. Also, the informality and the brevity of the conversations helped prevent making a mountain out of what was still a molehill. I think my calm presentation of a problem that needed a solution was a little disarming. I wasn't there screaming about their terrible kid. I just wanted to figure out exactly what was happening so that we could find a solution.
While I encountered parents who were convinced that their child could do no wrong, all of the kids left my son alone immediately after the visits. Less than six months later he was invited to play by a couple of the kids and it was just ordinary kid play. Maybe we were just lucky but it worked.
Anecdotal at best but I started a small forum (~250 users globally; most in the US; middle-aged women) last fall. I periodically review by IP and either all of my members have static IPs (no way) or their DHCP server is simply renewing the same IP for all of them. With the exception of one AOL user, those that have more than one IP associated with their login are quite obviously coming from work during the weekday and then from home the rest of the time.
With a static IP I figure I might as well do the test, especially since I'm in one of those under-served areas where we are supposed to have 10/2.5 but it actually got slower when we were informed that they had upped us from 1.5/0.5.
"You need to take a longer term view. Your vote serves to do more than simply help that candidate win that election. It also serves to increase (however slightly) the profile of that candidate, and by extension the party. Every vote that goes to a third party is one that helps further the belief that a third party candidate is viable." - CecilPL
I think you seriously underestimate the number of Adblock users. I frequent a board with a current average of 10K unique mostly female visitors daily, hundreds of new visitors daily, and most of them are just barely able to operate a computer. Adblock is currently spreading faster than any virus on that board. What amazes me is that the ads served by the site are about 95% pertinent to the board topics and still the users want to get rid of them. Well, I'm amazed they caught on to FF as well.
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
