Last week’s news about a cyberstalking case in Issaquah made the headlines, mostly due to the young age of the accused “cyberstalkers”.

Two girls, ages 11 and 12, were charged after investigators believe they used a former friend’s password to post sexually explicit messages and photos on her Facebook page. They also allegedly used the messaging feature to make it look like the girl was trying to arrange sex acts with random strangers.

The story seemed to make headlines everywhere; even newspapers in Australia ran the story. Seems like a pretty big deal, right?

King County prosecutors think so, and their cure for this type of behavior is to lock ‘em up. Prosecutors say that these two girls are facing 30 days in the juvenile detention center. That’s about one-third of the sentence you get for killing the Tuba Man.

A similar case happened in Florida earlier this year, and the two teenage girls in that case were facing adult jail time. Instead, they were sentenced to a diversion program, which usually includes curfews, community service and restrictions on computer access.

The Issaquah school district doesn’t think it’s a big deal, and they don’t appear to feel any responsibility in this case. The alleged victim’s family said they weren’t taken seriously when they reported the incident to school authorities.

The district spokesperson told a reporter that the school wasn’t investigating because the incident didn’t happen on school property. She said that the school wasn’t disrupted, and that the only disruption has been caused by the media.

I didn’t bother calling the spokesperson, since she seemed pretty annoyed about having to do her job.

But the school district doesn’t have their head in the sand completely. They pointed to their Internet safety school poster campaign, morning announcements, and a booklet that was handed out to kids, plus one for the parents. However, both booklets look like a clip art factory exploded onto them, so it’s easy to see why people probably aren’t reading them.

The kids’ booklet is a readable 9 pages long, while the parents’ booklet has 54 pages, but neither one of them talks about the actual consequences of bullying people online. Most of the information in both is limited to a “be nice to everyone” message.

It’s an important message, of course, but hanging a few posters and distributing booklets is not a solid plan for teaching empathy to our kids. No one would consciously think, “I was going to start a Facebook group called ‘Jane is a Slut’, but that poster next to the bathroom made a good point about being nice to people”. The posters didn’t work in this school; maybe they aren’t big enough.

The easy way out is to buy these posters and handbooks to absolve schools of any responsibility, and to hide behind the excuse of, “It didn’t happen on school grounds, so it’s not our problem.” The more difficult path is to have a complete program to work with parents that helps develop good character in their kids, on and off campus.

I don’t bring this up just to be critical of school administrators. They are already asked to do too much, and every high profile problem results in another half-day of mandatory training. Asking them to develop another program to alter human societal behavior in addition to 180 days of academic instruction is unfair.

Schools rely on outside curriculum writers to provide these materials, and a lot of them are not that good. If you’ve ever heard someone reading educational materials from a script, you’d recognize the clumsy, unnatural speech that results from using these materials. If the presenter doesn’t seem sincere about the topic, then the listeners are quickly bored. Message fail.

Left out of the discussion is the fact that none of the three girls in this story should have been on Facebook in the first place, since the minimum age allowed is 13. There’s a good reason for that rule, because 11 and 12 year olds do stupid stuff.

Teenagers do stupid stuff too, but age 12 is when you first begin to take the perspectives of others, and can more fully comprehend the consequences of your actions.

For now, schools and parents need to keep the message simple. “If you take over someone’s Facebook profile, you will go to jail. If you harass somebody online, you will go to jail. If you threaten to hurt or kill someone, you will go to jail.”

This cyberstalking case was preventable. We need to stop being lazy about building our kids’ character, insist that schools take this problem seriously, and insist on education that helps them avoid breaking the law.