Sarah Ball
"I was very isolated at school..."
Sarah Ball, 19, endured the unthinkable when she was just 16 years old, a sophomore at Hernando High School in Brooksville, Fla. It was a nightmare that followed her for three months, and even to this day, surfaces on occasion.
She was the victim of cyber bullying.
After her 18-month relationship with her boyfriend ended, Sarah turned to her group of five friends for comfort. However, comfort and reassurance were not what Sarah received. Instead, a status was posted by a girl who Sarah considered a friend that read “I hate Sarah Ball, and I don’t care who knows.”
Sarah can’t pinpoint what happened to cause people to turn against her, but it devastated her. Soon after the Facebook status, Sarah’s picture surfaced on the “Hernando Haters” community page. She was pitted against her best friend where students could rate them based on their physical appearance. On Sarah’s picture, her best friend’s boyfriend tagged her picture as “ugly whore.”
“I was very isolated at school. No one wanted to talk to me …,” Sarah said. “No one wanted to be around me, like I was a leper or something. I started self-harm, thoughts of suicide - it was very common.”
Her mom, who had access to all Sarah’s accounts, saw the messages and emails that Sarah had been receiving. It was then that Sarah told her everything.
“We decided within that week [of her finding everything] to send out packets everywhere we could,” Sarah said. “I printed out everything. Text messages of one of them confessing to making a fake account and a fake website that put all of his peers on it … I got all the evidence I needed, printed it all out and sent it to my school’s principal. He didn’t do much about it. He just said ‘we’ll look into it.’ … Everything was going so quick. After my mom found it, everything started falling into place. We were sending out packets to newscasters, radio stations and other schools …”
Soon after sending out evidence of hate websites where cyber bullying took place, such as the “hot or not” websites, Sarah created Hernando County’s first ever anti-bullying event, where over 500 people attended. Today, Sarah speaks at high schools around the area to raise awareness involving cyber bullying.
She created Hernando Unbreakable on Facebook and still maintains it to this day.
Written by Gillan Ludlow
