Bullying has always been with us. But the Internet has done two extraordinary and contradictory things: it has mass-produced bullying, making it easier to torment vulnerable young people repeatedly in front of an ever-larger crowd, and it has also shone a bright white baking light on the bullies themselves.

As every miserable kid knows, you can’t run from bullies. But the bullies can’t run away now either, at least not after the fact.

This didn’t help Rehtaeh Parsons, 17 , and it certainly didn’t help Audrie Pott , a sweet 15-year-old San Jose girl who was sexually assaulted at a party seven months ago. Days after the images of her attack were posted online, she hanged herself. Three 16-year-old boys were arrested this week.

Sexual assault and bullying are different things. But the prolonged daily battery of online torment can be harder for a young person to endure than a single event of sexual attack. Does the new journalistic willingness to discuss suicide help a child’s mind leap instantly to self-destruction? We have made a new deathbed and our children must lie in it.

I interviewed the British novelist Stephanie Merritt in Toronto recently. She writes historical fiction under the name S.J. Parris and was publicizing a fine new novel, Sacrilege . But I love her best for her 2008 memoir of depression, The Devil Within . A better book about the suffering of a bullied young girl has never been written.

What makes Merritt’s book unique is its candour combined with intelligent analysis. Few misery memoirs offer both. The American legal journalist Emily Bazelon has written a new book, Sticks and Stones , with the standard chirpy subtitle, Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. As if it were that easy.

So we have bullying in both theory and practice. Merritt was 11 when it began. She entered her school a normal happy child “with no reason to dislike herself.”

“Almost immediately I discovered that I was all wrong. Not that I had got things wrong: I simply was wrong, everything about me from my hair to my bag to my shoes to my music to my vocabulary.” Every schoolday was a litany of torment to the point where she began to spend her lunch hour crouching, shivering, in a ditch, wondering how she attracted such hate.

Of course they followed her and found her, in the dirt, and then she began to wonder how to kill herself.

Given her later diagnosis of a life-threatening bipolar disorder, Merritt now wonders if the level of horror she endured as a preteen, at a time when the brain is still developing, set her up for a lifetime of depression.

To a certain extent, Merritt was rescued by the passive attractions of the distant adult world. She had a vague idea that there would be a time, perhaps in university, or in a city, when her intelligence would be valued. Her teenage memories make her sound like a Jewish girl living under Nazi (bully) occupation and hoping the Allies (adults) would rescue her. They did not.

I have faith in Bazelon as a legal theorist but she has no talent for rendering emotion. It’s just as well because a blind jumping to conclusions has not served us well. Uninformed anti-bullying prevention sometimes makes things worse.

Bazelon turns to the pioneering Swedish psychologist, Dan Olweus, who began in 1978 what we might call “bullying studies.” He defined bullying’s three components: “verbal or physical harassment that occurs repeatedly over time and involves an imbalance of power.”

These criteria would fit Rehtaeh (Heather spelled backward) and Audrie, with a hideous spin. In a new century, the invention of online life meant victims could be bullied even as they curled up in their bedrooms sobbing. Online means repetition. It means constant onslaught. What raped adult could withstand this, much less a teenager?

What about the tormentors? Bazelon came up with a taxonomy of bullies. There’s the “bully in training” (the teenage thug who beats you up), the clueless bully who isn’t very good at it, the bully-victim who gets it from both sides, the popular bully (often a girl) who uses psychology to dominate and torture, and then finally, the “Facebook thug.”

The people who bullied Rehtaeh and Audrie to death — and we don’t actually know who they are although they were probably other teenagers — possess the same contradictions as do adult Internet trolls. They may be meek in person but behave viciously online. They become a different person.

That’s why the arc of these two girls — from physical attack to online torment to self-destruction — seems so bewildering. Who could be cruel enough to post photos of a rape?

In real life, we find it impossible to understand a rapist. But a secondary rapist? A post-rape sadist? A rape celebrant? Why?

The answer is dehumanization. This is a bookish column. We turn to books now the way Merritt did at age 11, for a detached explanation. Bullies themselves are woefully inarticulate.

In Stephen King’s 2009 novel, Under the Dome , the leatherheads place a clear dome over a small town to watch the humans trapped inside turn on each other. “She [inside the dome] is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day,” writes King, the master of human cruelty.

Inside the dome were girls like Rehtaeh and Audrie. To their online viewers, they were insects. They were “sluts.” Why post a comment like that online? Well, why not? Sluts aren’t human.

“Every text, every negative thing she would read to me. It was hard,” Rehtaeh’s mother said about her daughter’s suffering after the rape. “She tried and she kept trying.” As we will have to try and keep trying because we have failed our young so badly.

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