Students take cyberbullying to whole new level by sending emails through a hacked computer to a teenaged schoolgirl

A mother of a 13-year-old girl speaks about how her daughter, Kersten Laughlin was cyberbullied through school technology.

Amy Laughlin, a mom in Belton, MO, says her daughter, Kersten, has been receiving unpleasant emails through schools hacked email accounts. Amy claims that all the bullying messages were received from Kersten’s friends’ email addresses. However, officials at Belton Middle School, where Kersten is a seventh grade student, have reinforced that the email are not being sent from friends account but from someone who has hacked into those accounts, Laughlin says.

It all started in mid-April, when Laughlin received a phone call from Kersten in the middle of the school day. “She was hysterically crying,” Laughlin tells Yahoo Parenting. “She said “Mom, they said I’m fat and ugly and need to die.”

When Kersten returned home from school that night, Laughlin browsed through her daughter’s school-assigned iPad and found a bunch of bullying emails that looked like had come from a variety of addresses. “They said things like ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fattest one of all?’ Really mean stuff,” Laughlin says. “It’s degrading her so badly, and it’s on the email they use at school to turn in assignments. I’m basically sending my kid to school to get emails telling her how fat and ugly and horrible she is.”

Laughlin says she is not too anxious about Kersten, but is worried about the other victims who may be receiving similar kind of emails. “Kersten’s a pretty tough kid but you worry about the ones that don’t talk to their parents or don’t speak up,” she says. “And no matter how tough you are, when you get enough of these notes it’s going to get to you.”

Laughlin said that Kersten has received such 20-30 emails in a span of two weeks. “The school has admitted that someone is hacking accounts,” she says. “They squash one but then they start coming from someone else.” Laughlin says that she has got to know that another six girls and one boy have been targeted by the emails over the last two weeks, who have received notes from five different email addresses.

Laughlin says her husband had gone to the school board to complain on April 16, which was the day after Kersten called home in tears . “I’m not going to say the school wasn’t doing anything, but we were told it would be taken care of, and she was still getting these emails day after day,” Laughlin says. “We probably won’t get information about who is doing this, since it’s a minor. And that’s a little scary, to think this person is still going to be near her and we’re not going to know who it is.” The last email was received on Friday; so Laughlin is expecting that the school may have finally suppressed them.

However, no response was received immediately by Yahoo Parenting from the Officials at Belton Middle School.

Laughlin says that she is of the opinion that allowing iPads in the classroom is a mistake. “The kids are too smart for them, they are ‘jailbreaking’ them – getting past school security measures – and how is it productive for them to be in class getting email after email?” she says. “I wish the school would give kids back their paper and pencil and give them a technology class, where they are monitored. At least when they are on school time and school property.”

Resource : Yahoo!