DS threw bully’s phone in lake

[CandidBeaker]

DS, 13, and his friend were being bullied by some other children in the park yesterday and a girl was filming him having his books thrown on the floor so he grabbed the phone from her and threw it into the lake. She hit him and then they all ran over to the lake and DS and his friend came home.

I received an angry voicemail from her mum this morning demanding that I pay for a replacement. I was fuming. I’m not paying for a new phone when she was the one who caused it herself by joining in harassing my son. It’s called karma. If she thinks I’m buying a new one she can fuck off. AIBU?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 👏

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??

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.

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.

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

Somebody breaking into your house brandishing a knife may not actually intend to use it.

Or the householder could be completely lying and the 'visitor' was actually a meter reader who was running late and so stopped by for entirely innocent purposes at 3am - he needed a torch by that time, and the only one he had happened to be an additional built-in feature on a 12" dagger.

Either way, I presume it would be equally as wrong for the householder to grab the knife off him - or at least not to put it somewhere very safe, where it would stay pristine, and give him a cloakroom ticket to reclaim it at his convenience...

We've come way past the time when the only 'weapons' that people could use to do serious harm to victims were sharp or blunt heavy implements. As we tragically read upthread, somebody's life can be easily (quite literally) ruined or lost by an aggressor without any need for a gun or a knife.

Indeed. And, as with all genuine retaliation, it would never have happened had the aggressor not started it.

There's a brilliant man in the US (not a teenager, granted) who specialises in fighting phone scammers. He uses a voice changer and acts to sound like a confused, vulnerable old lady. Then, when the scammer goes in for the kill, he remotely accesses the scammer's computer and deletes all of their files - all of their victim databases, system files, records, the lot - which obviously proves a massive setback to them in scamming further (genuinely) vulnerable people.

But going on some of the opinions on here, this hero of the people is actually a baddie who is every bit as wrong as the people who contact their victims seeking to steal all of their money and leaving them destitute, humiliated and devastated.

Honestly i think as adults we are able to rationalize a situation but children cannot, especially a child who is being mocked/bullied with a camera pointing at them and has a gut reaction.
Many of us im sure have done things in the heat of the moment that we regret.

Perhaps this girl didnt realize the extent of the damage she was causing by filming it.

If i was HER parent i would be telling her its a harsh lesson to learn, in life you have to advocate for others that cant, and stand up to what you believe is right, and whilst thats something that i dont expect children to be perfect at i would expect her not to whip her phone out and start filming someone else misery.

If someone breaks into your house brandishing a knife, you can use reasonable force to deal with the situation. Further, the law recognises that in the heat of the moment you may go further than is strictly necessary. That is a very different situation from this, where the girl may not have been filming at all and, even if she was, she may have intended it for OP's son to use as evidence. It may have been reasonable for him to grab the phone and delete the video. Throwing it in the lake, however, was not.

the girl may not have been filming at all and, even if she was, she may have intended it for OP's son to use as evidence.

Yeah, all of that could be true...

Interesting how none of the others tried to stop her, if they knew she wasn't one of them and she was gathering evidence to be used against them.

I wish more victims would do this to bullies using their phones to humiliate them. I'm so glad smartphones weren't a thing when I was getting assaulted and verbally abused every day I attended school, the damaged little sadists would have definitely utilised them.

Wouldn't bother engaging with the mum unless she turns up on your doorstep, she most likely won't want to hear about what her darling daughter's been up to and will have decided that because her kid's a girl and your son's a boy that he must be the aggressor.

To say again, we only have OP's son's version of events. That may not be what really happened. The only thing we know for certain is that he grabbed this girl's phone and threw it in a lake.

"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."

Yes it's BS.

1. Defending yourself from bullies isn't a "wrong" so that old cliche doesn't apply.
2. Even if it were, who cares if a victim of bullying comes up smelling of roses? That's not the priority.

I mean, lots of kids are taught "don't hit back or you'll be in the same trouble as the person who hit first" and I don't think it's a healthy lesson at all. Defend yourself, put a stop to it if you're able to.

I never understand why people involved in bullying take videos when it's evidence of their own wrongdoing. Destroying the phone was wrong because if the film had got out there would be watertight proof of who was in the wrong. Always let idiots film their misdeeds.

Defending yourself from bullies isn't a wrong. However, destroying the bully's property is wrong. In this case, where there will be conflicting accounts of what happened, the problem for OP's son is that he has committed a criminal offence. If he had defended himself without destroying this girl's property there wouldn't be two wrongs.