Let's take a moment to realize that 95% of you hadn't heard of cafe mom as an outlet until just now. And that the article's headline is misleading/tabloidy at best. And while the rest seems well researched, it's clearly misleading a bit. If you start beating a kid on the bus and ask others to join in, it's not a surprise that you get suspended. Yes, she's also the victim of terrible bullying and felt let down by the faculty (who - understandably - may need more than hearsay before they start taking action). You can still not beat people up. Nobody doesn't understand that she did it. And indeed even the police looks at all of this as mitigating circumstances. And she's back in school and on probation and that's hopefully what they do with all kids who start fistfights. The buried headline is that the other kid is under police investigation, which has the potential not only to get him suspended after all but will have even more serious consequences. From what I read here, the system works as well as it can but the story is written to cause outrage.
I understand that victims of bullying like this or sexual assault in general face an uphill battle they never wanted to fight. And with the details in this story I can totally understand why the girl snapped. And I wish her nothing but the best and appropriate punishment for the kids who circulated the images. And still, you can't resort to violence and expect not to be punished for it. We are not talking about self defense here.
I mentioned that I do understand why she did what she did. You add more information to this story that only increase understanding as far as I'm concerned.
Let me turn this into an extreme example for comparison's sake. If a parent shot their child's rapist and murderer, we all get it. Nobody will say "I have no idea why they would do such a thing." A lot of us outsiders would look at that case and even be glad about this outcome. And at the same time, the mother or father would end up in prison. Because you cannot take the law in your own hands and expect not to be punished for that. There will be mitigating circumstances, they won't go in for life. The punishment might just be exactly the time they spent in custody before their trial. But there will be punishment because we have rules about that. (Obviously, this example is not the same as this case of bullying. I'm only using it to compare consequences.)
Was this self defense? She was just defending her digital privacy? I'm not a lawyer. As a layman, I'm going to say this does not meet the legal criteria. Morally? Absolutely.
We can meter out appropriate punishment to everybody else here: the school that maybe responded badly. The parents of the dipshits who got their hands on an undress app. The fact that there are undress apps available to middle schoolers or anybody really. Etc. But we also have the benefit of hindsight.
You and I get why she threw punches. We might even go as far as cheering her on, in our heads, had we somehow been there. Go get those bastards, black eyes for all of them. My point was merely that if you resorted to violence like that you cannot expect not to be punished for it. Like in my extreme example, there are mitigating circumstances. Plenty of them. All should be considered. But there will be something on the record. In this case the suspension/probation, which I hoped is the punishment for every fight.
She got suspended and he didn't (yet, as we find out halfway through). The headline of the linked article in the post implied that this was the outrageous part. My criticism was aimed first and foremost at the writer/editor of that article.