I think the girl that commited sucide had problems to begin with. I was bullied/harassed several times back in the day and never thought of sucide. That's just the way it was. Don't get me wrong,what they did was wrong,but it's not like they forced her to commit sucide. It's just another case of people over-reacting after the fact. Kids have always bullied and harassed other kids in school. That's a fact. Are schools going to get every kid in school arrested,that bully/harass someone else. If that happened then there would hardly be any schools left. You just have to have a strong mind and can't take everthing so personal. Everybody is overly sensitive and over-reacts. I guess that's the sad world we live in.

I dealt with bullies all of HS. Noone ever did one thing about it even after all the fights which included my friend getting his wrist fracutured. There is a big difference in some bullying and stepping way over the line. I am perhaps a bit bias on my choice of what should be done because really My school life was a living hell everyday from 8-3. and I still to this day have no freaking clue why they pciked on me and my friends.While they would see it at times they just told us to walk in groups. Well, no shit but so did they and they usually had more.

Should they be charged with the suicide? No. Should they be charged with harassment, stalking, and the like? Yes. I just hope that girls family sues them so hard that they are forever financially crippled though. They should have penny they earn belong to someone else.

Of course she had problems. Doesn't justify what they did. They wanted the harassment to cause her eventual suicide, and they were glad when it did.

As badgenome said, they did not show any remorse. Fuck these kids.

You shouldn't be arrested or charged for not having enough remorse. You should be charged for concretely defined and spelled out actions.

On the flip side, I don't think that the victim's mental condition should be taken into account. It works both ways. People who stalk and harass, whether or not the person had mental issues or not, will always get punished, no more severely, no less severely. It demands justice, not revenge, not apathy.

Law has to be unemotional, it has to have standards that apply to everybody.

I know, I just said that out of frustration since I have a kid sister myself who has been a victim of bullying in the past. 

Probably it's one of the most difficult things to combat in nowadays schools, mainly because kids are rarely held accountable for their own actions. That sentiment of protection allows them to pretty much do whatever they want without thinking of the consequences.  

Yeah, I know. I was also bullied for the better part of my school years, so I know how dealing with that crap can be like.

Kids can be a lot crueler than adults when given the opportunity and tools to do it.

As for bullying - IMO one of the essential ways to deal with it is to make these kids realize what they're doing is wrong. Unfortunately, that just spurs some of them on, and many of them just don't realize what kind of damage they can do until they're older, and by then it's too late.

While punishing bullies for infractions is completely fine by me, you can fight bullying just with that, since that won't make them stop - they'll just move it outside of the school etc. to avoid getting caught. The same goes with teacher interference, which, when excessive, can only hurt their chances of curing the disease instead of just treating the symptoms, so to speak.

That's what's happening in here. Recent education laws have supposedly restricted inside-school bullying mainly because of infractions, punishments, fines and ultimately, expulsion from the school in question. 

But instead of solving the problem, it has taken to outside the boundaries of school, which has only aggravated the problem tenfold. Now we see kids who were being bullyed on school, suffering the same agressions on pretty much everywhere, as there are no methods of control outside of the school recint.

The biggest issue is that the common public doesn't care about that, since we still have that mentality of "The weak have to bend over for the strong", hence no one gives a flying damn about bullyed kids, sometimes, not even their own parents. That was what lead to the suicidal 12 year old kid of last month, even his parents wouldn't believe him.

If no one has the consciouness to deal with this problem head on, how can be ever hope that children will ever learn that what they're doing is wrong and destructive, not only for the ones that they are bullying, but also to themselves. 

That is so not true. By causing an explosion, it eats up all the oxygen so the fire dies off because it is starved. It's used with oil burns mostly, but yeah, explosions do end fires.

OT:

I have had a give and take relationship with bullies, and it does suck really hard to be on the taking end.

Over here in Finland, many people still have that same mentality, and to an extent, they're right: People should try to solve their own problems when it's reasonable. However, they also take it to a ridiculous degree - it seems to be a part of Finnish mentality to assume one should always solve personal problems by themselves, regardless of the problem and whether it can be done or not. I've known people who have died because they've been way too stubborn to ask for help when they needed it the most (ie. going to a hospital). But I digress.

Parents are a big factor in bullying, since they can both strive to stop or exasperate it. It's not exactly uncommon for parents to always take their kids side and outright refuse to believe their little sunshine could ever do anything wrong. On the other hand, they could also just not care what their kid does, or actually act to stop it, like my mom did. Then again, parents can't really do everything in this case, since outside of drastic measures like switching schools, there's only so much they can do by themselves - the school, the parents and the kids themselves have to be involved in the solution of this problem.

I'd personally also task the politicians to help with this as well, but when the government is busy dealing with great, pivotal and above all visible issues like the economys freefall and healthcare, what do a few suffering schoolchildren matter?

And many former bullies have wisened up with age, realized what they've been and stopped, becoming decent people. However, there are those who didn't or even liked what they did, and now they're either criminals, addicts or otherwise troubled people, or CEO's and politicians. Go f'n figure.