Phoebe Prince's suicide shows students were running the island and adults were missing

It is either significant or merely interesting that William Golding dedicated his classic, "Lord of the Flies," to his mother and father. It is precisely the absence of parents, or any adult actually, that enables the boys of the island to descend into savagery, and it is the sudden appearance of an adult at the end that restores what we would now call law and order. This tale, way before its time, was a precursor to South Hadley (Mass.) High School and the death by suicide of Phoebe Prince (above). It was the only way she could get off the island.

After a lengthy investigation, the district attorney, Elizabeth Scheibel, had nine students arrested on criminal charges. At the same time, she alleged that while the kids had tormented Phoebe to the point where she hanged herself, teachers and administrators were somehow complicit because they knew - or should have known - that Phoebe was being bullied by a coterie of aspiring fascists. Phoebe was a newcomer from Ireland and thus, as anyone with the slightest novelist bent would know, the stranger with no champions, no defenders and, in her mind, no way out.

This appalling story has of course created quite a stir because it is about cruelty, which we do not understand, lack of empathy, which we find frightening, and conformity and coercion. But mostly it is about how little we know our kids, the little beasts who live among us and can sleep with a teddy bear by night and IM a 15-year-old colleen to her death by day. Who are these kids?

You will notice that in all the finger-pointing - the kids, the teachers, the administrators - not a digit is aimed at the parents. Their children are accused of hounding a classmate to death and the parents apparently knew nothing. Not only that, they are somehow not expected to know anything. The teachers are supposed to know what's going on. The principal. Maybe even the school nurse. But the parents? No. They're off the hook.