A framed photograph of Venusha Bandara sits near the home computer in her family’s living room. Venusha committed suicide at age 15 after her principal reprimanded her over a photo of her and a male classmate that another classmate posted on Facebook.
KURUNEGALA, SRI LANKA – Passenger buses and trucks laden with goods rush past a small green house by the side of the main transport road in Kurunegala, the capital of Sri Lanka’s North Western Province. Swirls of dust and exhaust fumes waft in from the road, accompanied by the insistent honking of horns.
Inside, no voices disturb the comparative silence. This is where 15-year-old Venusha Bandara lived with her parents and two sisters. It is also where she committed suicide on Feb. 5.
Her parents allege that Venusha killed herself out of shame and humiliation after her school principal reprimanded her over a photo of her and a male classmate that someone had posted to Facebook.
Two days before her death, Venusha was summoned to the principal’s office over the school’s public address system, says her mother, Sriyani Mallawarachchi. The principal had been informed of the online photo in an anonymous note.
“Imagine how shaken she must have been to know that she was in trouble and the entire school knew about it,” says Chamini Bandara, 22, Venusha’s older sister.
When she came home from school that day, Venusha did not share the details of her conversation with the principal. She simply informed the family that she never wanted to return to school, Mallawarachchi says.
The principal asked Venusha’s father to come to the school for a conference on Feb. 5, she says. As her father unloaded a delivery truck at his grocery store before going to the school that morning, Venusha hanged herself at the family’s nearby home.
In a suicide note addressed to her father, Venusha explained that she was taking her life because she did not want to bring any more shame on her father or their family, Chamini Bandara says.
In the note, she asked, “Why are they not blaming the person who uploaded the picture and only blame me?”
The family has not seen the photo that started the cycle of events. The classmate who had posted it to Facebook took it down shortly after Venusha’s death, Chamini Bandara says.
An investigation into the principal’s actions and Venusha’s death is underway, says Anoma Dissanayake, chairperson of the National Child Protection Authority, the government agency responsible for protecting children and teenagers from abuse.
Officials of the authority confirmed that the photo was of Venusha and a male classmate, taken during a school trip. In the photograph, they are seen walking down a narrow street smiling into the camera.
Cyberbullying is increasing in Sri Lanka, experts say.
Bullying through social media can cause young people constant fear and anxiety. It often leads to depression and psychosomatic illnesses, and can have a negative impact on personal development. Many Sri Lankan youths are subjected to online bullying, psychiatrists and counselors say. The National Child Protection Authority is beginning to work with students and schoolteachers to raise awareness of the dangers of cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying is a new social phenomenon in Sri Lanka and has not been formally researched, officials of the authority say. Since cyberbullying is not an offense under Sri Lankan criminal law, the authority has not been collecting data on reports of cyberbullying.
Most victims of cyberbullying are girls between the ages of 13 and 18, says Yashali Abeysundara, law enforcement manager at the authority. Abeysundara culled the information from an informal survey of complaints received by the authority’s Cyber Watch unit from January to June.
Most online bullies are taking revenge on girls who end relationships, Abeysundara says.
“Most often boys of the same age category bully the girls,” she says. “It is not like in other countries where they attack a person’s appearance. Here the bullying always takes a sexual nature.”
The most common complaint is of a boy posting nude pictures of an ex-girlfriend on social media sites, Abeysundara says. Sometimes boys will edit pornographic images to make them look like the girls they are bullying.
Samudra Kathriarachchi, head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, has observed depression and post-traumatic stress in young people who are bullied online.
Kathriarachchi, who treats teenagers as a consulting psychiatrist at the Colombo South Teaching Hospital, a government hospital in a suburb of Colombo, says bullied teens often have adjustment disorders and other symptoms of psychological distress.
“More than anything else, their opportunities to learn and develop as children are lost because of cyberbullying,” she says. “They miss out on a social period of life, and so they miss out on their lives.”
“I have seen a lot of bullying,” says an 18-year-old girl who attends secondary school in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. “Some of my friends are pretty hurt about the comments they get.”
At the student’s request, her name has been withheld to protect her from any shame associated with bullying.
Most cyberbullying is sexual in nature, she says. Boys post comments about girls’ bodies and refer to them in derogatory terms such as “slut.” Using offensive language, they insult girls’ parents, ethnicity and religion.
The student says she has received hate messages from anonymous users on ask.fm, a social networking website on which users post queries and responses.
These messages sadden her, she says. It annoys her that people choose to send messages anonymously.
“What kind of people send out hate messages to someone they don’t even know, or send them anonymously?” she asks.
Psychiatrists who work with teenagers say they are seeing an increase in such cyberbullying incidents.
“I see a lot of childhood and adolescent depression, and cyberbullying seems to be a contributory factor,” says Dr. Chamara Wijesinghe, a lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Kelaniya and a practicing psychiatrist at the Colombo North Teaching Hospital in Ragama.
Cyberbullying is more difficult to avoid than physical or verbal bullying, in which exposure to an anxiety-producing conflict is limited to a particular time and place, Wijesinghe says.
“The problem with cyberbullying is that it is pervasive,” he says. “A bullied child does not know what is on his Facebook. She does not know if emails have been sent out with a picture she sent to her ex-boyfriend. The degree of anxiety in cyberbullying is 24 hours, and that constant level of worry and anxiety is a huge problem.”
The Colombo schoolgirl agrees.
“In cyberbullying, you don’t always know who is doing the bullying,” she says. “It could be your best friend or a stranger. You can’t avoid it like you can avoid real-world bullies.”
Cyberbullying is more difficult to forget than physical or verbal bullying, Wijesinghe says.
“The moment you write it down, it’s on paper, it’s in an email, or on Facebook, you can’t get it out of your mind,” he says. “It is concrete, it keeps coming back, and it’s forever. That is where the problem in cyberbullying is. It doesn’t go away compared to other bullying.”
The pervasive nature of cyberbullying causes chronic anxiety in bullied children.
Although such distress isn’t always classifiable as a mental illness, it can lead to a breakdown in a child’s everyday functions, Wijesinghe says. Some bullied children have psychosomatic symptoms, including headaches and abdominal pain.
After reviewing their symptoms, Wijesinghe diagnoses most cyberbullying victims with depression, he says. Because depression in young people can lead to self-harm and even suicide, it must be treated.
Wijesinghe has treated many patients who engage in regular patterns of self-harm, such as cutting themselves or overdosing on medications, he says.
Over time, cyberbullying can stunt a teenager’s personality development. Unable to adapt socially, they can develop low self-esteem and personality disorders.
Kathriarachchi has treated several teenage girls who have experienced extreme forms of cyberbullying, she says.
In one common form of coercive behavior described by Kathriarachchi, boys cultivate online relationships with girls and persuade them to pose nude or engage in cybersex via Skype, the service by which associates can communicate live over the Internet using microphones and webcams.
A girl lured into such conduct often feels guilty afterward and decides to break off the relationship. The boy might then threaten to post a recorded Skype interaction online if the girl refuses to continue the online relationship or meet him in person.
Counselors at Sri Lanka Sumithrayo, a charitable organization that provides cost-free counseling and emotional support, say an increasing number of young callers to the Colombo center’s hotline are seeking advice on how to handle cyberbullying.
From April 2013 to March 2014, 9 percent of the hotline callers were between the ages of 10 and 20.
“The challenge to young people on coping with new technology is enormous,” says Jomo Uduman, a Sumithrayo counselor who works with young people. “Online technologies can disseminate distressing information about an individual in a flash.”
Still, most young hotline callers are concerned about family conflicts, strained friendships, broken romances and pressure to excel in their studies, Uduman says.
“I don't think that cyberbullying is a major issue in Sri Lanka yet,” he says. “It's not common yet, or if it is, it is hidden and isn’t being shared with us.”
Charities and mental health professionals are working to raise awareness of cyberbullying among both children and adults.
The Cyber Watch unit of the National Child Protection Authority, set up in 2000 to prevent computer-based security threats to children, has developed a program to raise awareness of online threats among students and teachers, Dissanayake says.
The pilot stage of the program was launched in July. By 2015 the program will cover all districts of the country, she says.
Medical treatment is also available. Young people can be treated for the mental health impacts of cyberbullying with medication and counseling, Kathriarachchi says. She recommends family support, assertiveness training, limiting online access, and helping youngsters develop as whole people.
Research into cyberbullying is urgently needed, Wijesinghe and Kathriarachchi agree. Both say cyberbullying is on the rise in Sri Lanka.
“Clinically, we see the worst-affected cases of cyberbullying,” Wijesinghe says. “Based on this, we can easily know that there is a group who is affected but not coming to see us, and it must be quite high.”
Kathriarachchi fears that cyberbullying will become a major social problem in Sri Lanka.
“I can only see the tip of the iceberg,” she says. “There may be many more incidents of cyberbullying in the community which are not coming to me or the other psychiatrists. When I see the tip of the iceberg, I am scared. I worry about what’s happening underneath the surface.”
In their quiet home in Kurunegala, Venusha’s family continues to mourn her death.
They hope their painful experience will lead to heightened protection for young people, Mallawarachchi says.
That was also Venusha’s last wish.
“In her suicide note, she hoped that her death would prevent the same from happening to another,” Mallawarachchi says.
GPJ translated some interviews from Sinhala.
The author Chathuri Dissanayake and Anoma Dissanayake are not related.
