(Strasbourg) “They told her every day to die. Go and hang yourself. Slit your wrists. They encouraged her to kill herself”. And in the end, they succeeded. It is heartbreaking to listen to Jackie Fox, the mother of Nicole — “Coco” to her family —, the young Irish woman who took her own life at the age of 21, on 18 January 2018, after more than three long years of threats, physical violence and cyberbullying inflicted by her “so-called friends”.
“She was always singing”. Jackie Fox recounts how her daughter could no longer bear the pressure. “I stand before you with a heavy heart. My beautiful daughter, Nicole, was the light of every room, with a huge smile”. “Even though Nicole used to sing, she had the most horrendous, horrific, singing voice… I had years of happy childhood memories with Nicole”.
Then the darkness arrived: “It all started with one person”, a classmate, who created “a group of followers to target” my Coco.
Jackie pauses, hesitates, then continues recounting the violence inflicted on her daughter: the beatings, further threats. “They told her they would never leave her alone, encouraging her to kill herself”.
The tragedy. That ordeal lasted more than three years. At a certain point, Coco began to withdraw into herself. She would sing no more. “She started to spend so much time in her room and this is where the self-harm started to happen”. She would “dig her nails so deep into her skin”, her legs, her belly, her face… She felt bad. “Nicole’s anxiety got worse and worse, and every time she would always say to me, ‘What are they going to do next to me, Mam?’”.
Until one day, returning home with one of her sons, Jackie found Nicole hanging.
The world collapsed around her; her family was devastated. The anguish, the loneliness, the remorse. “These people, these nasty cowards” killed her, she says with tears in her eyes. She herself — Jackie suggests — thought of taking her own life: “I decided to go with my little girl one night. I was missing her so much. All I wanted to do was give her a hug, give her a kiss…”.
Coco’s Law. But at that point, Jackie discovered that there was no law in place in her country to prosecute those who had driven her daughter to death. “I was horrified and sickened to learn” that those responsible “would never ever be prosecuted”. Thus began an unrelenting civic commitment. She launched a broad campaign to make online bullying a criminal offence. She mobilised other people, other parents of persecuted children, reached young people and eventually also politicians. In the end, in late 2020, “Coco’s Law” (Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020) was signed. The law specifically criminalises the taking of, sharing of, or threatening to share, intimate images without a person’s consent, with or without intent to cause harm to the victim. More broadly, this law punishes cyberbullying, of which thousands of young people — and not only them — are victims. In Ireland, for example, nearly two hundred legal proceedings have since been opened under “Coco’s Law”.
An appeal. From the seat of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Jackie Fox launches an appeal — almost an imploration: that Coco’s Law be made a European law, to protect all children and adults from such horrific abuse. She warns of what digital technologies and artificial intelligence could produce, if misused, to the detriment of everyone. And she concludes: “We need so much to protect our adults and children”.
The post Online bullying: “They killed my Coco”. Jackie Fox’s appeal for a European law first appeared on AgenSIR.