Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
2020 marks the 10 year anniversary of the death of Phoebe Prince, a South Hadley student who took her own life after intense bullying by several older students.
EMMA RUBIN ’20
Content warning: this article references suicide and sexual violence.
It was a cold winter day on January 15, 2010 when around 200 South Hadley High School students gathered on the school’s softball field. Some held back tears, others held candles. They came together, bundled in winter coats, as a community in the face of a sudden tragedy.
“On Thursday afternoon, we received the heartbreaking news that one of our freshman students died unexpectedly,” Gus Sayer, then-superintendent of South Hadley Public Schools, announced in a pre-recorded message earlier that morning. “Counselors from the high school and other schools in the district, as well as from other school districts, are assisting the high school community handle this grief-filled day.”
Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old freshman at South Hadley High School, had died by suicide the afternoon before. As word spread and rumors swirled, students questioned the environment of bullying in the high school.
“We have all been picked on, been in her place,” then-student Eric Loubriel said in a speech at the vigil. “We have all been picked on because of our weight and glasses or something.”
Students wondered aloud in whispers and in interviews with local reporters the role of a group of upperclassmen who had persistently harassed Prince.
Phoebe Prince had moved to South Hadley the previous fall semester. She came to the town from across the Atlantic: County Clare, Ireland. In the Pioneer Valley, she settled into a group of popular freshmen girls and later caught the attention of a group of six seniors who would become legally implicated in her suicide.
These students, the “South Hadley Six,” faced multiple felony charges in the wake of Prince’s death, after what the prosecution alleged were “nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats,” The New York Times reported.
It didn’t take long for the media to become captivated by the tragedy of Phoebe Prince. Headlines read “Immigrant Teen Taunted by Cyberbullies Hangs Herself,” “The Untouchable Mean Girls” and “Suicide in South Hadley Bullied to Death?” The details of Prince’s life, including her sexual history, how she died and the bullying she endured, were thrust into the national media. The story caught the nation’s gaze as a cautionary tale of the dangers of bullying, and South Hadley High School was at the center of it.
Prince had suffered from depression and had previously attempted suicide. However, in the immediate aftermath of her death, nuanced discussions of how the bullying exacerbated her previous struggles with mental illness were largely absent.
The Prince case was a watershed moment for discussions of bullying in adolescent culture. Had the conversation been different, could it have also been a watershed moment for the national conversation on mental health?
In the years since Prince’s death, though, the conversation has changed. Amber Douglas, dean of studies and a professor in the psychology department at Mount Holyoke, researches how people move forward from traumatic events.
Though she wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Prince’s medical history, she discussed the general relationship between mental health and stressful experiences like bullying.
“If you’re in a chronic stressful environment that is challenging to your sense of self and personal integrity and it’s being processed as a threat, over a period of time that’s going to be challenging,” Douglas said. For students with vulnerable mental health, she explained, it is harder to rebound from that trauma.
As media coverage grew, the six upperclass students who bullied Prince became targets of cyberbullying themselves. People posted graphic death threats and organized Facebook pages dedicated to publicly shaming them. The online attacks reached their peak when District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1977, announced she would go beyond the school’s disciplinary actions and prosecute the teenagers.
Five of the six teenagers were sentenced to community service on charges of harassment and violation of civil rights — some of the insults invoked Prince’s Irish heritage.
Meanwhile, South Hadley Public Schools reached a settlement of $225,000 with Prince’s family in exchange for their agreement that they would not sue the school district over their daughter’s death. South Hadley school administrators maintained that they were not aware of the extent of the bullying. The then superintendent and high school principal have both since retired.
The names of the “South Hadley Six” became forever associated with the case. Sean Mulveyhill, the football captain who was considered a leader of the bullying campaign, was later hired to work in Mount Holyoke’s pub, The Cochary Pub & Kitchen.
In spring 2019, a Mount Holyoke student said in a sworn affidavit that he had raped her. The student was allegedly giving him a ride home from work when the assault occurred. Mulveyhill has not been criminally charged but was ordered by the East Hampshire District Court to stay away from the student and the Mount Holyoke campus. A hiring task force was convened to review hiring practices in the wake of controversy.
Ten years have passed since Prince’s death, and many consider it a turning point for national anti-bullying legislation. Prince’s story sparked a Massachusetts law which was lauded by several experts as the most comprehensive in the nation. The system, which requires that school administrations track instances of bullying, reported 1,935 bullying cases in the 2017-2018 school year across the state. However, other statistics suggest that the reporting process is not entirely comprehensive. A CDC study in the same timeframe reported that 14,000 Massachusetts students had experienced bullying.
Jennifer Matos, a professor in Mount Holyoke’s psychology and education department, said that to minimize bullying, teachers have to create a safe environment.
“One of the things I always tell my student teachers is to know your students, to get to know them not just as students, but what they’re interested in outside of the classroom,” she said.
Matos hopes that, by creating open and welcoming classrooms, students can feel more comfortable seeking help with concerns in regards to bullying or mental health. “We [as teachers] are responsible for the communities we create,” she said.
Douglas recognized that people have begun to pay more attention to the impact of bullying since the Prince case, but also noted that mental health resources for youth are still lacking.
“They are interrelated and separate issues. There’s bullying issues and mental health concerns, and there’s the impact of bullying on mental health,” she said. “Those are three areas where more attention needs to be paid. I think the bulk of where attention is being paid is on bullying prevention, with this idea that if you stop the bullying then all the other things will [follow].”
However, Douglas emphasized the importance of treating mental health as its own issue as well in order to address underlying health concerns. She also thought group setting preventative discussions about mental health, like a lecture in a health class, could be an important step to targeting the issue.
“Oftentimes, the model we have as a society is the individual model rather than more preventative psychoeducational components,” Douglas said.
On the local level, South Hadley Public Schools recently reflected on the 10 year anniversary of Prince’s death.
“Since [Prince’s] death by suicide, her life and death have changed who we are as people, students, parents and citizens of the world,” Kyle Belanger, chair of the South Hadley School Committee, wrote in a statement. “Our community’s hearts still grieve with, and for, the family whose souls were left with an unfillable void.”
The statement also noted training, professional development and education initiatives within South Hadley Public Schools to promote “community service, kindness, positive friendship and citizenship.”
Interim Superintendent for South Hadley Public Schools Diana Bonneville published a statement on Jan. 14. “While this incident no longer defines who we are, it has most certainly shaped our policies and the type of school system we strive to be,” she said. “While we promote the positive things our schools and students bring forth, I am most proud of our sense of community and the climate of respect, kindness and acceptance we instill as a school district.”