To think justice served on the Mum of Disabled Child in Revenge Attack

[Mitmoo]

Thanks to milkmilk for posting this on a different thread but it has got lost.

The mother of a disabled child who plotted a revenge attack on a poster who launched attacks on a disabled child via the internet found not guilty.

DM but that doesn't matter - it's an important article.

A mother who joined a revenge attack on a man responsible for a vile campaign of internet abuse against her disabled daughter has been spared prison.

Sylvia Hooper, 52, was described as a ?decent and law-abiding? woman who dedicated her life to her seriously ill daughter Kim Arnold. But she snapped after looking on helplessly as a cowardly bully sent her a series of appalling comments via Facebook.

One labelled her a cripple and said the wheelchair user should be left to ?roll down a hill.?

Another message read: ?Your mother should have had an abortion. She only had you because she felt sorry for you.?

Mr Hooper, 19, punched the bully after his mother said ?hit him? and Berwick was then taken back to the family home by car. He was forced to crawl inside and make a ?grovelling apology? to his victim while on all fours. At one point he was hit on the chin with a rolled up newspaper.

All three admitted assault but denied false imprisonment and the judge ruled that not guilty verdicts should be entered.

He said: ?I sentence you on the basis that Mr Berwick sent messages that were wholly disgraceful and shameful but then tried to put the blame on his girlfriend.?

Mrs Hooper was given a conditional discharge. The two men were given community orders which included voluntary work.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2028961/Judge-spares-mother-jail-plotted-attack-internet-troll-posted-horrific-comments-disabled-daughter.html#ixzz1Vpq1S3To

Precised down full article on the above link.

Good for the judge, the right decision was made.

But the law should be equal for everybody whether you are a 'nice' person or a 'nasty' person

yay so a thug torments a disabled girl and he should be treated as a victim....

not in my world thank god

why did they not just block this tw*t on FB.The girl's family are the thugs- people can't just take the law into their own hands.tHESE PEOPLE BEHAVED INFINITELY WORSE THAN THE CYBER BULLIES

Am disgusted that anyone would think kidnap and assault for any reason is acceptable.

You get a slap - if this were a woman kidnapped and assaulted there would be uproar - how can you have one rule for one and another for someone else - you can't the law should not differentiate.

Violence is wrong and the more of you that bring your children up to know that violence is wrong no matter what the nicer this world would be.

I dont know. If a couple of women decided to give a vicious, cowardly, nasty female bully a slap - would there be uproar?

Not from me.

I dont codone violence generally. I am not a violent person.

But sometimes only a slap will do. This is one of those times.

Even Ghandi got lairy sometimes 'It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence'.

DS2 (3yo, balance disorder and deaf, so walks and speaks unusually) was horribly mocked today in the hospital playroom of all places. Two much older kids, parents nowhere to be seen... I felt like knocking their fucking heads together. I terrified them instead by snarling speaking to them about his disabilities, prefixed by "Is that my little boy you're calling a 'stupid ant who walks like this'"

Sorry to thread jack. I'd like to think I'd rise above thuggery in this situation but just don't know what I'd do if pushed. I guess today I got a taste of what things will become for us as he grows up.

The law says that you look at a crime in context. These are people who have no record of criminal behaviour and have been pushed to the limit by the despicable behaviour of a vile human being. The magistrate took that into account.

I'm sorry that happened to you MissBetsy.

Oh, my little boy isn't violent any more, I taught him how to walk away from trouble and how to ignore the taunts and it took a long time.
He's a dear, sweet loving child. Likes kittens and rainbows and lego.
But you know, it's the strangest thing.
Now he's 6', Aspie stare, wears black and looks like a werebear, all the taunting seems to have died away.
Do you think people have got nicer, or do you think that the fact that under stress he looks as if he will rip off a head has anything to do with it?
That's right, he's the scary one you cross the road to avoid on a dark night.
If he had CP and was in a wheelchair, I wonder what the difference would be?

Thanks, EvenLessNarkyPuffin I'm a bit bruised still. It has happened before, physically and verbally at soft play (of course!) and I can't say that I was unhappy when DS1 weighed in punching before I realised what was going on.

thefirstMrsDeVere I agree, absolutely.

Bullying the disbled girl was dispicable, but that in no way justifies them being spared jail.
To punch and kidnap someone goes way, way, way beyond what anyone could consider reasonable or justified.I hop the sentence gets reviewed!

Glad the judge didn't agree with you. [grins]

goblin, sometimes they are lucky and have an older brother who wears black and is tall and built and will rip their heads off

But there is middle ground between isolation and over exposure.

No-one on this thread has said that people should cut themselves off from the world to prevent bullying, no-one. People have said that there are steps that can be taken to limit one's exposure to it. Block the perpitrators, set your settings so that you're not visible to the world so that if they create new accounts they can't get to you.

Ultimately, the internet is a public platform, and if you publish your name address and phone number along with an identifyable photograph of yourself up there then you have no idea who has access to it. You wouldn't publish that kind of information in a national newspaper, so why on a website with over two billion users, where you have no idea who is A able to access it from the website, and B, able to access it from other sources i.e. search engines.

To state that the family could have blocked these comments does not make one disablist, any more than to tell someone not to leave their handbag in full view in an unlocked car makes someone pro theft.

That the man was in the wrong is not and never has been in dispute here. All people are saying is that if the mother had just blocked the comments rather than waiting for them to continue then it wouldn't have got to a point where she had taken part in a pre-meditated asalt on this individual.

Syber bullying isn't the same as physical bullying. It isn't. If someone stands face to face with you/attacks your house/your children/threatens physical harm to you then it is much much harder to take steps to prevent that. As I said further up the thread, you can't block people in rl. But you can online. You don't have to engage/on fb you can block them/on email you can block them, if it stays online there really is no reason why you have to put up with it. That doesn't make you in the wrong if you choose not to act, but equally if there are steps you can take then why ever wouldn't you?

He wouldn't, 2shoes.
But fortunately with bullies, mostly you just have to look too dangerous to take on, and they will choose a different target. Unfortunate if you are that second target.

A common quote is that a civilisation is measured by how it treats its weakest members, origin lost.

Here's another quote from Warren Buffet:
'Let's say that it was 24 hours before you were born, and a genie appeared and said, 'What I'm going to do is let you set the rules of the society into which you will be born. You can set the economic rules and the social rules, and whatever rules you set will apply during your lifetime and your children's lifetimes.'
And you'll say, 'Well, that's nice, but what's the catch?'
And the genie says, 'Here's the catch. You don't know if you're going to be born rich or poor, white or black, male or female, able-bodied or infirm, intelligent or with learning difficulties.'

Violence is wrong, but is self-defence, or defence of someone under your protection?

but it wasn't an equal self defence, was it? How far should you be able to go in "self defence"?

I can totally understand that someone might be pushed to the limit by a sustained campaign against them, especially when the law appears not to have been on their side.

But A, they could have blocked the comments. You can argue that they shouldn't have had to, but the fact remains, they could have, and chose not to.

And B, the "justice" they served was totally disporportionate to what had triggered it. Now if the brothers had gone round there and given the lad a talking to, maybe even held him up against a wall and threatened that if he persisted then they would come back that would be one thing, you could see that and sympathise with it and probably even say fair play to them. But

"Mr Hooper, 19, punched the bully after his mother said ?hit him? and Berwick was then taken back to the family home by car. He was forced to crawl inside
and make a ?grovelling apology? to his victim while on all fours. At one point he was hit on the chin with a rolled up newspaper." it's physical vs emotional, on what planet is that ok?

Imagine if a poster posted here that she'd wound her dh up to the limit. Had taunted him over something again and again and that eventually he'd snapped and beaten her up. Whose side would people be on? Would they be saying "good on the dh, you obviously pushed him to the limit and he snapped," or would they be saying "ring women's aid, he should never hit you, no matter how far he is pushed."

Either you believe that violence is wrong, or you don't.

And if it's pre-meditated then it's not self defence.

"Mr Hooper, 19, punched the bully after his mother said ?hit him? and Berwick was then taken back to the family home by car. He was forced to crawl inside and make a ?grovelling apology? to his victim while on all fours. At one point he was hit on the chin with a rolled up newspaper." it's physical vs emotional, on what planet is that ok?

We all agree she should have been punished, many of us agree that a conditional discharge given the levels of abuse she endured was a fair and proportionate punishment. No one is saying she was right, just that jail would have been an unjust sentence.

Which is why abused women who wait for their abuser to be disabled through drink, or sleep and then kill them are usually sent to jail.
What they did was wrong, but those of us with experience of our children being targeted by others purely because of their difference are saying that we understand why they felt there was nothing else they could do.
The bully wasn't knifed or shot, he wasn't battered to death like Sophie Lancaster. He was humiliated in front of the one he had terrorised and forced to apologise.
Possibly given the chance to mend his ways so there would be no more next times.
Wrong, but my sympathies lie with the first victim.

but why did they not block the messages?

Yes, the police should have acted.

Yes, he was in the wrong.

But as has been said time and time again they could have blocked his account and blocked external users from being able to find this girls's profile online.

Why would you choose to continue to put yourself through that if you had a choice to stop it? Why? If he'd moved on to other means of bullying after that then that's a different issue, but currently all that is being debated here is syber bullying. So if you could stop it (and by locking down the account they could have stopped it) why wouldn't you?

There have been some great posts on this thread, I particularly remember Peachy's on page 2. This is a wider debate about disablist bullying, and there have been sadly too many posters who have shared their horrendous experiences trying to protect their children from the nasty people out there.

What concerned me about this thread was that some posters tried deliberately narrow the debate down to blaming the parents for not being facebook savvy enough. I am quite astounded that people who can eloquently express themselves are more than happy to deflect a thread which clearly strikes a raw nerve.

I know facebook isn't the universe, but nobody can deny that social networking reflects real life. We have made our own social rules yet they are uncannily like the ones we hold in real life. Where it does not, is among children and so we take care of them and we protect them the best we can. Just because, sometimes, we can't, and the technology runs ahead of us, does not mean it is right for someone to cyberbully. Equally, it does not mean that a disabled person should be over-protected to the point of invisibility online.

In the good old days, disabled people were HIDDEN. They were locked away, or usually just sent away but didn't bother escaping because there was nowhere to go and nobody wanted them. Until the 1930s they were picked up off the street and taken into institutions without any consent from their parents or themselves.

What this man did IS illegal, on several levels, the police are failing to prosecute all too often because parents are TOO BLOODY KNACKERED to fight a legal battle with a twobit smalltime bully whatever impact the bullying may have had on their child. A swift right hook is a lot easier and a lot more satisfying. The bullying has to stop, the police have the laws with which to stop it and should be suing the pants off people who think it's smart.

I find the Warren Buffet quote very interesting - we need to create the world we live in to be fair for all of us, and the more we whitter on about how it's the parents fault that a child is bullied, the more steps we are taking into a segregated society.

I don't know, and until and if the family speaks about it, no one will.
But what support did they get? Did anyone from the police or SS come along and have a conversation with them about what they could do to protect their disabled relative? Or were they left floundering and uninformed?

The police are ineffective, as shown numerous times, in cases of hate crime against people with disabilities. Perhaps this woman's actions may make the police think twice about being so damn useless.

It's a sad indictment of a flawed society when a mother feels she has no choice but to do this.

None of this would have happened if he hadn't been a shit.

If you don't want to have the shit kicked out of you, don't go looking for ways to pies people off, it really is that simple.

Personally, I think the rolled up newspaper was an excellent touch.

Why should she have had to shut herself away and hide herself and isolate herself because of one single person?????????

The revenge just wasn't right, it wasn't. But putting the onus on the victim to isolate themselves because of one twisted individual is also very wrong.

it is easier though glitter.
this thread should have been about how we can stop men like this, (and woman( who treat disabled people so badly.
instead it is about how the victim was wrong!!
I am always shocked that mn still shocks me, I should be now aware how biased against the disabled mumsnet is.
I have been on so many shocking sick threads(that havn't been deleted!, watched a bigot troll the boards(only banned for racism in the end) so why am I still shocked.

But it's not nice is it 2shoes?
It's one of those turn the other cheek, be better than your persecutor, aren't the disabled supposed to be law-abiding and carers are really angels in human form with our special little children thoughts.
Except some angels carry swords and kill demons.
Stuff Gabriel and his bloody lily, let's have Michael, trampling evil underfoot.