Tyler Clementi’s tragic death in September of 2010 served not only as a reminder to us of how quickly our children can become the subject of ridicule and cruelty, but also how the rise of cyberbullying and the immediacy of the Internet have made the days of schoolyard bullying pale in comparison to the horror that bullying is now.
Today, almost a year and a half after the day that Tyler took his own life when he found that he was at the center of Internet cyberbullying – and after months in which anti-bullying nonprofits have surged, school assemblies have charged forward at full force, and school counselors have flooded the hallways –the trial of Dharun Ravi, the 19-year-old who allegedly taped Tyler having an intimate moment with another man and made that video go viral, is commencing.
In fact, reports say that by the end of today, a jury may soon be selected in the trial of Ravi, a former Rutgers student. Today, Judge Glenn Berman called 35 potential jurors into the courtroom and asked each a series of questions about how much they know about the case, whether they were biased and how familiar they were with Rutgers University.