April 23 - Love Story
By Paula Penfold
Of the many gut wrenchingly sad aspects of the case at the centre of last night's 60 Minutes programme, "Love Story", one of the saddest is the insight into the supreme position that technology occupies in the lives of teenagers.
When 15 year old Hayley Fenton realised she needed help after attempting to take her own life in the bathroom of her Rotorua home, she didn't ask the people who were in the same house with her - her nan, and her cousins - she texted the boyfriend who'd just broken up with her. That's right; there were people home, just a room away, and she sent a text message to someone nowhere nearby, to ask him to take her to hospital. He didn't come, and by the time she was taken there, it was too late.
Hayley's relationship with Pelesasa Tiumalu was doomed from the outset, although of course she didn't realise that, basking in the glow of what her family describes as her first love. She'd met him at an after school job. He liked her because she always said hello to him, always had time for him. Their romance blossomed, and, being 15, she laid bare her feelings for him via texts. Lots and lots of them.
But it was doomed because Tiumalu was, as her family discovered too late, a married (albeit at that stage separated from his wife) 27-year-old father. Dating a 15-year-old girl and professing, again via text, his love for her. Until he decided to get back with his wife, broke up with Hayley, and she made the decision to end it all.
Unfortunately, there was another layer of complication at play. Pelesasa's wife, Elina Tiumalu, had intercepted Hayley's texts and responded with a barrage of her own: abusive, intimidating, bullying messages that are shocking to read. Elina Tiumalu admitted two charges of intimidation and received a nine month deferred sentence.
But Hayley Fenton's family wanted more than that. To their minds, the sentence should have been much harsher and in fact they believe the charges available to the police weren't sufficient to reflect the particular nature of what can happen via text communication - how easy it is to write hurtful, frightening messages and in the push of a button, that hurt is inflicted in a way somehow different and more intimate than in other communications. The Fentons believe there is something specific to the nature of text bullying that meets a different threshold to that of intimidation under the Summary Offences Act. They want text bullying made a crime in itself.
And they may be onto something. The Law Commission is currently reviewing the laws around cyber bullying and text bullying. The Rotorua Coroner, too, who conducted the inquest into Hayley's death, wants to examine what laws are available in the case of text bullying, particularly where there's a death. As he said in court, "it's shocking what happened to her [Hayley]".
You have to be careful of course, because there are often multiple factors in suicide, and in any case, nobody knows whether that is the outcome that Hayley Fenton intended. Yet what is clear is that hers was by no means an isolated problem. Vodafone now has a Blacklist service, which blocks bullying or unwanted texts. Only a year or so on, it already has 48,000 customers and rejects more than 4,000 texts a day.
That's one hell of a lot of nasty texting going on. Time to have a talk to the kids.
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