Contributed by Annamarya

Phoebe Prince was a beautiful brunette with a full smile and sweet eyes. Late this past summer, she and her family immigrated to America from Fanore, a quaint seashore town in Clare, Ireland. They settled in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where their extended family lived. Prince attended South Hadley High School for few months before she committed suicide on January 14, 2010 – at the age of 15. And why did she take her own life? Because she couldn’t take being bullied anymore.

The “initially…relatively popular” Prince allegedly dated two boys two of her six tormentors (four girls and six boys) dated. These two brief, innocent flings angered the two girls and, deciding payback was the only appropriate response, put Prince through weeks of physical and emotional violence. On the day of her suicide, she was harassed in the school’s library and after school let out. While she walked home, one of the girls drove by, taunted her and hurled a can at her. Prince went inside her home and hung herself in the stairwell – dead by 4:55 pm. The six accused – 16-year-olds Ashley Longe, Flanner Mullins and Sharon Chanon Velzquez, 17-year-olds Sean Mulveyhill and Kayla Narey, and 18-year-old Austin Renaud – were charged with felonies in connection to bullying that, prosecutors say, led to Prince’s death.

The saddest part about this story is that while a sickening one, it’s not uncommon. In May, 16-year-old Christian Taylor, and 11-year-olds Celina Rebecca Okwuone and Ty Field, committed suicide on separate occasions. So did 13-year-old Jon Carmichael in March. And 13-year-old Hope Witsell in 2009. And 12-year-old Maria Herrera in 2008. And 13-year-old Megan Meier in 2007. And 16-year-olds Kristina Arielle Calco and Jeffrey Scott Johnston in 2005, respectively. And 13-year-old Corinne Wilson in 2004. And 14-year-old Matthew Alexander Epling in 2002. And 14-year-old April Himes in 2000. And Jared Benjamin High in 1998. And countless other. All because they were viciously bullied. All because they felt the only way to end the bullying was to remove themselves from the equation.

What’s worse? It took Phoebe Prince’s death for Massachusetts lawmakers to sign Anti-Bullying legislation into law. And when did that happen? On May 3. Bullying is nothing new, so why did it take a suicide – one that could’ve been prevented if school staff didn’t ignore what was happening right under their noses – for lawmakers to take action in protecting students? (more…)

Interviewed by Cherie

No matter what country you live in, if you are a young mother being pushed out of school, call Benita Miller and you can trust that she will respond. Believing that an education is the only way for an individual to rise out of poverty and thrive, Benita left her career as an attorney and founded The Brooklyn Young Mother’s Collective which helps disadvantaged young mothers become educated, find work and develop self-sufficiency.  A single mother herself Benita discusses the pressures of not being taken seriously by others who view motherhood as an “obstacle” and the challenges the young mothers she works with face in a society that views young black motherhood exclusively as a social welfare problem. For Benita, the focus should be on lifting these young women out of poverty so that they can properly take care of themselves and their children, instead of focusing on curbing reproduction and preventing abuse, which is what is currently being done.

Can you describe the work you do at The Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective and how you provide support to young mothers?

I launched BYMC in 2004 to ensure that disadvantaged young mothers have access to school. Our main objective is to positively connect these young women to school so that they are able to thrive in post-secondary education and have work opportunities.

What are some of the challenges facing young, under-privileged mothers today?

The primary challenge is that their motherhood becomes an obsession of the public instead of ensuring that these young women are positively connected to education and work opportunities. We focus solely on preventing secondary births and making sure that children are not neglected. By working in this very narrow way, we miss the chance to help young mothers thrive and build a better future for themselves and their children.

What made you decide to leave your career as an attorney to become the Executive Director at The Brooklyn Young Mother’s Collective?

I didn’t actually set out to leave. I started by providing lunch time workshops about family court to young women attending an education program for pregnant students. I then started to see how this program didn’t go very far in helping these young women excel academically and worked with young women attending the program to push to have it closed. Our next fight is to make sure that high school graduation among the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children actually catapults them to a future beyond low-wage work.

How does your training as a lawyer inform and help your work at BYMC?

I am a poverty lawyer – I set out to leverage my legal training to fight poverty. I believe that by drilling down beyond civil rights and talking about poverty we actually approach a human rights frame. My job as a lawyer is to fight laws and policy that keep people poor.

As an African American woman in law, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

I was a single mother when I landed on Syracuse University campus for law school and I’m forever grateful to the many classmates, faculty members, Syracuse residents that took me and my son in with the sole desire to see me “make it.” However, the biggest obstacle I faced was also a blessing – motherhood. It’s true that law is a jealous mistress so my legal training and early legal career had to fit around my important role as mother. Often, my legal peers didn’t always take me seriously because I was young, from Detroit, black and parenting. This has shifted quite a bit over time and frankly some parts of the legal community never appealed to me in the first place.

In an interview with Brooklyn Rail you talked about your childhood where kinship networks were strong and neighbors looked out for one another, helping in whatever ways they could. Do you feel that this is no longer a reality today?  Why not?

From my own childhood and experience as a mother I think that for middle class women these networks are more visible. These networks still exist among poor communities but the dominant culture tries to dismantle the network not only through child welfare intervention, but also by promoting a culture of distrust among poor women. I make sure to emphasize to my staff and the young women that I serve that their families and community add value to our human experience. By doing this we resist the way these families have been marginalized.

How were you able to fund BYMC? How does the recession affect your fundraising efforts?

I write grants and the staff does some smaller scale fundraising. I’m from Detroit, the daughter of a factory worker, so I always plan for bad times! As a result, (more…)

Georgetown law student Rachel has always had an interest in civil rights and constitutional law but the need to pay off her school loans and other considerations made her accept a highly paid summer position at a major corporate law firm.  In this interview, she talks about how hard it was for her to make such a decision and shares with us her fight  to finish school after being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and deciding to register as a disabled student. Rachel’s many interests and ambitions has made her a “go-getter” in the truest form, but her recent experiences has also led her to realize the importance of maintaining her own health while balancing life, career and family, something that was not always at the top of her agenda.

Age: 25

Places you have lived: DC and Philadelphia

Places you want to live: I am in love with DC and Chicago.

Job: Law Student at Georgetown. I started part time while working for a nonprofit and then moved into the fulltime program.

Having done both, do you prefer to be a part time or a full time law school?

Despite the large amount of work (I attended class 5 days a week at night and spent all my weekends studying), I really enjoyed the evening program because it was not competitive and the class was a great collaborative environment. I really enjoyed being part of a group where some of my fellow students were older than me and had been working for years or had families. It really enriched the conversations and I actually enjoyed every single class, which was surprising, but it difficult to balance work with school because I felt there were only so many hours in the day that you can dedicate to such critical thinking so, I moved into the fulltime program. When I switched, a lot of the students came straight from undergrad and there is just a huge difference between someone who has actually experienced working versus someone who has been writing essays since they were six. People who have been able to experience the world versus people who have just written about it; you just realize that a lot people are still trying to get an apple from the teacher! I can’t imagine going straight to law school and then getting your first job ever, it seems so backwards in my opinion.

When you graduate do you see yourself doing legal aid work or working at a big firm?

You just hit the crux of my quarter-life crisis! My entire life I have been invested in the nonprofit world. I grew up with it as my dad is a director of a nonprofit and I worked in many incredible public service internships. When I entered law school, I wanted to work in civil rights policy or constitutional law and I believe that is something I would like to do long term. But recently I was offered a job at a major firm for next summer and because it is a very prestigious opportunity, I was really happy about it, but I never considered working at a law firm. However, through advice from my old boss whom I really admire, I realized that in order finish your legal education and learn to exercise your muscles in the right way, you need to be part of a law firm for some period of time so that you learn the way the system works before you move on to start your own thing. The paycheck is also absurd and while my dream job would be to work for a civil rights job that pays 30,000, I think learning about the private sector first is very appealing.

Are you at all worried about the intense work schedule ahead of you when you start at a larger firm?

Well in the interview process they always say that they want you to have a work-life balance where you can spend time with your family, resting, exercising in order to stay healthy, but I think that for any first year associate at a law firm, there just isn’t time for any of that. You are at their beckon call. A lot of people I meet in their firms call their blackberries tethers because they are tethered to them due to the workload. You are very low on quite a high totem pole when it comes to the legal system.

Was there ever a situation where being a woman has helped you or hurt you when it came to interviewing and getting a job in a law firm?

Despite any recent changes, there are still more white males in law firms, because it is still very much an old hat industry. When I interviewed for a number of law firms, during one of my callbacks, I interviewed at a firm where there wasn’t a single female lawyer working there. For the first time during that callback I felt like a woman becoming a lawyer, not a student becoming a lawyer. I couldn’t help but think, could any of these people answer my questions about maternity leave, going part time in order to raise a family, or even do I need to wear pantyhose in the summer all the time? Not that I would necessarily ask that in the initial interview, but it made me think is this somewhere that I want to be in the coming years. It definitely turned me off much more than I thought it would.

Prior to law school, you have also been quite active politically. Can you talk about this experience? What do you think stands in the way of women becoming political leaders?

By no means did I win every year, but I ran relentlessly for office every year since I was five. I was the representative of the student body in kindergarten, mayor of the second grade, active in student government throughout high school, student body president in college, and after college my first job involved helping campaign donors decide where to put their money to help the progressive agenda while volunteering for the Obama campaign. That being said, I think women’s toughest critics will always be women, because who knows them better. When I think of Hillary Clinton running for president, she was herself and presented an image of a strong woman so of course with that came a lot of stereotypes. However she showed that despite the many barriers, she could knock them down without making it look very hard and I believe that is a testament to her. Nonetheless, I think the main obstacle has to do with the work-life balance issue and the issue of how does one raise a family while campaigning for years. The stigma of being a bad mother is something women have to deal with and men don’t have to consider. All and all I think there are a lot of obstacles, but I believe they can be overcome.

Are you still involved in politics or in any particular cause?

I recently had mono and had to withdraw from my two classes.  I am registered as a disabled student at the university because I thought it would help me with this exact kind of situation – my doctor said that my compromised immune system probably played a big part in my getting mono in the first place because I was so worn down from working full time and taking classes at night. I appealed to the University to ask them if I could just make up the six credits by taking them in addition to other classes during the regular school year, and they straight up said no.  As a graduation requirement, they do not allow any exceptions.

Of course, me being me, I was not about to just roll over. (Also, they’re wrong!)  I figured out which faculty committee made the decisions on the issue and got myself appointed as a student member.  After getting the issue on the agenda, researching and writing a 9-page memo about the history and purposes of the requirement at our peer schools, and being encouraged by faculty and administrators, at the last minute there was (more…)

Keeping in touch with over three hundred relatives is no small job and something Trips takes very seriously. However, after applying to over two hundred positions before finding the right one, I am pretty sure there isn’t much she can’t do when she puts her mind to it.

Age? 28

Where have you lived? In India, I lived in Bangalore, Bombay, and Poona. I also lived in London and New York.

Where do you want to live? New York is at the top but I would love to live in San Francisco and I have been trying to move there for four years now, Chicago even though the winters are tough, London if I could afford it, and Barcelona but my Spanish is not very good.

What do you do? I worked at the Associated Press and the Hearst Corporation and now I have just started working for a travel deals company where we post the best deals on our website and newsletter.

Among the following: family, social life, career/education, surroundings, what is most important to you and why?

Having grown up in a place like India where culturally families are so close-knit, family and friends definitely come first for me. I know not just my immediate family, but also my first, second, third cousins and everyone keeps in touch and tries to meet up often. Second is social life, especially in the field where I work because it is a very social industry and so you need to know the right people and meet new people. A lot of my friends think I am crazy because I know a lot of people in different industries. My career would come third but I don’t think of myself as a very ambitious person, busy climbing corporate ladders. I do find that I get bored quickly and so what drives me is to find something that doesn’t bore me. I have had four jobs in the past five years. I have been working since I was seventeen and was a lawyer in India before switching to Media.

Working for a travel company, how important is it for you to travel?

I think it has always been important, the problem is not having the vacation time to actually to do it. Particularly in the media industry, I have been in jobs where I get one week a year. I go to India every year to visit my family and I try to get other trips in as well. Now with this new job, I feel like I am actually getting to travel because they highly encourage it. They give you money to check out hotels and three extra days to travel in addition to my vacation.

Did you find it hard to find a job in this recession where the pickings are slim?

It was hard and the fact that I am here on an international work visa limits my pool making it that much harder. Looking for a job is a full time job and I become obsessed with these things. I applied to two hundred jobs in a week and got four calls. Two of them were gimmicks, one was not enough money and the other was where I am now.

Coming from Journalism School and having worked in print, is it your experience that print companies have welcomed online and digital or do you think that they are resistant to doing so?

I think print has built this bad reputation of being a dying industry and it really is not. It is not as bad as it looks and they have

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