DS threw bully’s phone in lake

In my experience of being bullied as a teenager sometimes you see an opportunity to retaliate that's too good to resist.

He says the phone was being used to abuse and harass him. We don't know if that was true.

It is not BS. Two wrongs do not make a right. That doesn't mean people shouldn't fight back. People absolutely have the right to defend themselves. But doing something that makes you no better than them isn't the way to go.

Plus a child who will snatch someone’s phone off them and toss it in a lake probably isn’t that easy to bully.

Just because he defended himself, doesn’t mean the bullies will think he isn’t easy to bully. You’re minimising what he went through.

OP’s son had a phone camera pointing at him while he was being humiliated. So the phone ended up in the lake. 👏🏻 Sounds right to me.

It’s not like he threw her in the lake is it??

No I wouldn't pay. Maybe it will teach her a lesson and she'll stop filming kids being picked on. Good for your son 👏

Plus a child who will snatch someone’s phone off them and toss it in a lake probably isn’t that easy to bully.

This thread is absolutely crazy, I can't believe the shit being spouted. Wtf are you even talking about? Do you know how you would react to someone videoing you in these circumstances? I don't.
Can't you imagine how bullying, harassment, intimidation, any multitude of situations might push a person to act out of character? I can.

Can you really not see the difference between removing an offensive weapon from someone using it to assault a victim and destroying a phone because you don't approve of what the owner is doing with it?

Well first of all you're minimising what was happening with the phone. It's not that he 'didn't approve of what the owner was doing with it' ..the phone was being used to abuse and harass him, and the footage on it would have been used to continue the harassment for however long. The internet is forever and if someone puts footage of you online without your consent to humiliate you, that's devastating for the victim.

But yes, nobody thinks that an offensive weapon is exactly the same as a phone. The point being made was in response to someone making an extremely black and white statement.
The idea that 2 wrongs don't make a right is BS, there's no virtue in not fighting back and we should all be teaching our children that it is right to defend themselves.

Well we don’t know that OPs son’s version of events is true. It may be more a case of 6 of 1 half a dozen of the other for all we know. Plus a child who will snatch someone’s phone off them and toss it in a lake probably isn’t that easy to bully.

There are repeated misstatements of the law on this thread.

Bullying is not an offence. A bully may commit an offence when they bully someone. For example, if they beat up their victim they are guilty of assault and possibly ABH or GBH. But bullying is not an offence in and of itself. In this instance, all we know of the bullying is that the bullies were allegedly throwing OP's son's books to the floor. Unless the books were damaged or he was assaulted in the process, this is not an offence.

Filming/videoing someone in a public place is not an offence. Some specific types of filming are (e.g. upskirting) but, in general, you are free to film people if they are in a public place. There are, however, limits on what you can do with the film or video. Publishing a video featuring an identifiable individual without their consent is likely to be a breach of GDPR. If this girl was, as claimed, filming the bullying, she was not committing an offence.

Most posters on this thread appear to be working on the basis that OP's son is telling the truth. We have no way of knowing that. Nor does OP. The boys he alleged were bullying him and his friend will have a different version of events, as will the girl. She may say that she wasn't videoing him at all, or that she was doing so to give him evidence of bullying to take to the school. She may be telling the truth.

The only fact of which we can be certain is that OP's son threw this girl's phone in a lake. If I understand OP correctly, he has admitted it. He has clearly committed a criminal offence. I'm not saying he would be prosecuted for this - it may fail the public interest test. But he has clearly destroyed the girl's property without a lawful excuse. His belief that she was filming him being bullied is not a lawful excuse. OP is not liable for this. However, if the girl took him to small claims for the cost of a replacement, I would expect her to win. She would then be able to enforce the judgement plus interest when he has some income and can afford to pay.

Can you really not see the difference between removing an offensive weapon from someone using it to assault a victim and destroying a phone because you don't approve of what the owner is doing with it?

so much crap advice in one thread...

there is nothing to be gained by responding to the voicemail at this stage. it would be sensible to do a lot more research first.

ask your son to write down exactly what happened, in as much detail as possible - who did and said what, in what order - and exactly who else was there, and the history of interactions with them. did he get all of his books/ possessions back? are any of them damaged?

ask his friend to do the same.

ask them both for more info before you decide how to handle this.
do they all go to the same school?
have any of these people filmed similar incidents before?
what happened to that footage?
can you find any of it online?
was this particular incident uploaded/ livestreamed before the phone was unfortunately dropped?
does the school know about any of the previous incidents?
has their attitude been towards incidents of bullying?
was anyone else around when this happened, besides your son's friend?
any uninvolved members of the public?
is there CCTV in the park?

you said this girl hit your son. (something previous posters seem to have ignored. hitting someone is a criminal offence, 'assault', and usually considered much more serious than criminal damage to a telephone) - how many times did she hit him? what with? on which part of his body? is he injured/ bruised at all? if so, take photos, and consider taking him to the doctors so you have 'evidence'.

what is the school's bullying policy? and protocol for dealing with this kind of behaviour? is there a named person responsible for 'safeguarding'/ 'child protection' who you can contact to share your concerns about this?

he's only 13 years old, so could ring Childline for a chat as well if he wants to talk to someone who's not you, just for some advice from an impartial, anonymous adult.

you could call the NSPCC helpline if you wanted to talk to someone and discuss the different options for dealing with this kind of problem.

Daughter will have said she and her friends were minding their own business having fun together, when a group of boys approached, were nasty to her, grabbed her phone and chucked it in the lake.

The Mum's angry as she will have been told a sanitised version of what actually happened. She'll believe it as well. Her DD could never bully someone else dontcha know.

i didnt state it as a fact,
i said I doubt it is a school issue,

Inform the school of the bullying

Sure the video would have gone to cloud or google pics etx

That's evidence of bullying

Which is a crime

I'm a teacher and waste too much time trying to unravel nonsense like this.

I can tell you that the alleged aggressors will admit to knocking his books to the floor if this was witnessed, but say that this was retaliation because he did it to them yesterday, or he called them names, or he said something offensive first, or it's a long-running bit of fun that everyone does.

None of us know whether they are telling the truth or not.

But only one person threw an expensive item into water and damaged it beyond repair.

By that reasoning, you shouldn't take a baseball bat that's being used to lay into a victim and put it well and truly out of the assailant's reach?

The phone was used as a weapon to humiliate. Your son was brave and stood up for himself by acting in self-defense to get rid of the weapon!

I firmly disagree. If somebody is deliberately committing aggression or violence against you - be it physical, emotional or psychological - anything they have chosen to use as a weapon is simply collateral if it gets wrecked in any way.

The only tiny little thing that she had to do for her phone to not be damaged would have been for her to leave it in her bag and not decide to use it as a weapon in a bullying attack.

Do you also think that, when the police bash down the door of a known criminal in a dawn raid, they are at fault and that 'two wrongs don't make a right', so they were very bad for damaging the poor armed robber/drugs baron/paedophile's property?

True, he could have lied. But if he were lying, why would he have admitted to randomly taking her phone and flinging it in the water in the first place? If you're already making up lies to get yourself out of any trouble, why not just say that she must have dropped it herself, as he never touched it?

I don't understand this either. When the phone is being used as a weapon - to inflict emotional violence on the victim by filming and humiliating them to the whole world with a video that will stay in the public domain forever and ever - if their weapon gets damaged when the victim fights back, well boohoohoo.

If this were purely physical violence and an attacker were trying to stab you and you managed to grab the knife off them and throw it somewhere where it would get destroyed, not a single person would be saying "But that knife could have been a very valuable antique family heirloom, so you're responsible for damaging his property and you really must buy him a new one".

And shame on everybody trying to use the purported bully's sex as some kind of mitigation for her actions - it's hugely patronising and deeply misogynistic to suggest that a 'poor little girl can't possibly be blamed for what she was doing wrong'. Would that be because she can't be as clever as a boy, or as skilled in understanding people's emotions and feelings, or will be just generally much more helpless and immature than the boys? Horrific 'reasoning'.

I haven't read the whole thread, but it's tough tits really isn't it. I tell my son you're judged by the company you keep, in this instance, she was filming it all. She's a victim of her own crime I'd say.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Your son shouldn’t have taken and damaged someone else’s property.